Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment : New Directions in Critical Research [1 ed.] 9781623960513, 9781623960490

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Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment New Directions in Critical Research

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Curry Stephenson Malott, Series Editor

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Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment New Directions in Critical Research

edited by

Tricia M. Kress The University of Massachusetts Boston

Curry Malott West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Brad Porfilio Lewis University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Challenging status quo retrenchment : new directions in critical research / edited by Tricia M. Kress, UMASS Boston, Curry Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Brad Porfilio, Lewis University. pages cm. -- (Critical constructions: studies on education and society) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-62396-049-0 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-62396-050-6 (hardcover) -ISBN 978-1-62396-051-3 (ebook) 1. Action research in education--United States. 2. Qualitative research--United States. 3. Critical pedagogy--United States. I. Kress, Tricia M., editor of compilation. II. Malott, Curry, 1972- editor of compilation. III. Porfilio, Bradley J., editor of compilation. LB1028.24.C35 2012 370.72--dc23                          2012033290

Copyright © 2013 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Introduction: Seizing the “Moment”: Critical Researchers Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment............................................. vii Tricia M. Kress, Curry Malott, and Brad Porfilio

Pa rt I (Re)Theorizing Epistemology, Authority, Ethics, and Purpose in Critical Research 1 Uncollapsing Ethics: Racialized Sciencism, Settler Coloniality, and an Ethical Framework of Decolonial Participatory Action Research.................................................................................................. 3 Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard 2 Challenging Epistemological Authority in Qualitative Research: An Emancipatory Approach.............................................. 29 Noah De Lissovoy, Emmet Campos, and Jeannette Alarcon 3 On Considering Quantitative Research............................................. 53 Faith Agostinone-Wilson 4 Song of Myself: Honoring the Individual as Critical Scholarship.... 69 P. L. Thomas 5 Letters as Windows Into a Life of Praxis: Using the Epistolary Genre to Explore the Tensions Between the Private Self and Public Action........................................................................................ 85 Robert Lake



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Pa rt I I Critical Research With/in Educational Settings and Communities 6 Flexible, Reciprocal, and On-Site Research: Developing Praxis That Productively Challenges All Participants in a U.S. Urban School Community............................................................................. 105 Patricia Paugh, Jorgeline Abbate-Vaughn, and Geoff Rose 7 Multivoiced Research With Children: Exploring Methodological Issues in Children’s Documentation of School Projects............................................................................... 129 Christina Siry and Carola Mick 8 “Talk to Students About What’s Really Going On”: Researching the Experiences of Marginalized Youth..................... 147 Carl E. James and Leanne Taylor 9 The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education: Critical Race Theory and Burundian Children With Refugee Status......... 169 Nick Mariner, Allison Anders, and Jessica Lester 10 Video of the Oppressed: Insights Into Local Knowledge, Perspectives, and Interests With Youth............................................. 193 Donna DeGennaro and Rick Duque 11 Qualitative Research for Antiracism: A Feminist Approach Informed by Marxism........................................................................ 209 Sarah Bell and Mike Cole About the Contributors...................................................................... 225

Introduction

Seizing the “Moment” Critical Researchers Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment Tricia M. Kress The University of Massachusetts Boston Curry Malott West Chester University of Pennsylvania Brad Porfilio Lewis University

We stand at the threshold of a history marked by multivocality, contested meanings, paradigmatic controversies, and new textual forms. At some distance down this conjectural path, when its history is written, we will find that this has been the era of emancipation: emancipation from what Hannah Arendt calls “the coerciveness of Truth,” emancipation from hearing only the voices of Western Europe, emancipation from generations of silence, and emancipation from seeing the world in one color. (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011, p. 125)

This year (2012) marks 10 years of No Child Left Behind and the U.S. federal government’s official designation of what qualifies as “scientifically based Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages vii–xiv Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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research” (SBR) in education. Combined, these two policies have resulted in a narrowing of education via standardization and high-stakes testing (Au, 2007) as well as the curtailment of forms of inquiry that are deemed legitimate for examining education (Wright, 2006). While there has been much debate about the benefits and limitations of the NCLB legislation (e.g., Au, 2010) and SBR (e.g., Eisenhart & Towne, 2003), critical researchers have held strong to their position: The reductionistic narrowing of education curricula and educational research cannot solve the present and historical inequities in society and education (Shields, 2012). Contrarily, reductionism (via standardization and/or methodological prescription) exacerbates the challenges we face because it effectively erases the epistemological, ontological, and axiological diversity necessary for disrupting hegemonic social structures that lie at the root of human suffering (Kincheloe, 2003). Not only has NCLB proven incapable of overcoming inequalities, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest it was never really intended to eliminate poverty and human suffering. That is, it seems NCLB, despite its lofty title and public discourse, is actually designed to advance the agenda of handing public education over to for-profit corporations to manage and privatize thereby intensifying the capitalist class’ war on those who rely on a wage to survive (Malott, 2010). In the present ethos, reductionism upholds and retrenches the status quo (i.e., the basic structures of power), and it puts at risk education and educational research as means of working toward social justice (Biesta, 2007). Because social justice can be interpreted in multiple ways, we might note that we understand critical social justice as oriented toward action and social change. Thus, critical education and research may have potential to contribute to a number of social justice imperatives, such as: redistributing land from the neo-colonizing settler-state to Indigenous peoples, halting exploitative labor relations and hazardous working conditions for wage-earners, and engaging in reparations with formerly enslaved communities. In part, we agree with Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba (2011), who attribute reductionism to an abundant “reinscription of stern positivist ‘science’” (often equated with quantitative research), which is even more vicious than we have seen in the past (p. 125). Yet we hesitate to stop here because, as Ercikan and Roth (2006) note, all social phenomena are both quantitative and qualitative simultaneously; thus, all social science research is also composed of both quantitative and qualitative components, which implies a false binary being drawn between the two traditions. Thus, it cannot be solely positivism and quantitative research that are propelling the movement toward status quo retrenchment. As Kouritzin, Piguemal, and Norman (2009) assert, qualitative research too “does not always challenge the orthodoxies in research in the social sciences” (p. 3). Dehumanizing, reductionistic research can emerge from various research traditions. For instance, noto-

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riously throughout history, ethnographers have played a key role in the genocide of native peoples whose land was colonized by settlers (Smith, 1999). Research of any type can be used for both emancipation and oppression. In recognizing that both qualitative and quantitative research are tools that have been used to perpetuate human suffering, we begin to surface the hegemonic epistemological roots of retrenchment. The backlash we are facing is not simply about the quantitative/qualitative, positivist/ postmodern “paradigm wars.” Rather, we locate status quo retrenchment as occurring on various fronts: in the media, in our workplaces, in our social institutions, in ourselves; and amidst the multifarious pressures of Eurocentrism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, paternalism, androcentrism, ablism, and heternormativity. As critical educational researchers who are working in what Giroux (2005) calls “dark times,” we are thus called to disrupt retrenchment in multiple ways and in multiple locations because by continuing to only engage in paradigm wars, we will miss the mark and thereby perpetuate the retrenchment (and the resulting human suffering) that we seek to disrupt. Whether we are talking about the act of conducting research or the act of teaching classroom content, by simply debating about the how of method, we are precluded from identifying the why of method (Giroux, 1988). These are two fundamentally different questions; the former is mechanistic and rooted in procedural means-to-ends thinking, while the latter is axiological and rooted in questions of purpose and values that implore us to consider to what ends our methods should lead. By allowing ourselves to become mired only in questions of procedure, we tacitly sanction the existing hegemonic logic that frames the procedural choices we have before us because the ends of our research (i.e., our research purposes) are not called into question (Kress, 2011a). Without taking the explicit stance of research for alleviating suffering, and without challenging the very epistemological, ontological, and axiological frames that guide our work, we ourselves maintain the status quo that we purport to oppose (Kress, 2011b). From this vantage point, what we aspire to do with/in our research is shaped by our epistemologies (ways of knowing), which recursively inform and are informed by our ontologies (ways of being) and our values. To break from hegemonic thinking, then, involves seeking out questions of epistemology (what are the logics informing this research practice and from whose values do they emerge?) because the ideas we hold about Self/ Other and the world will shape our ontological selves as researchers and our ways of engaging with others who participate in our research endeavors. For example, research through imperial eyes may see indigenous knowledges as commodities that can be extracted from the community and then exchanged on the academic market for the researcher’s benefit (Smith, 1999). This way of thinking mimics the rape and pillage crusades of colo-

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nialism and global capitalism; research becomes self-serving and destructive. For these reasons, in this collection we have purposefully moved beyond the categorization of research as positivistic or not, qualitative or not, and instead, we shift the conversation to ask questions of radical purpose (Kress, 2011a): “research for what?” and “research for/by/with whom?” Shifting our questions to examine purpose allows us to then design our research acts as praxis such that the research we enact reflects the world we wish to live in; a world where humanity is more humane. Overview of the Book In the 4th edition of the Sage Handbook for Qualitative Research, Denzin and Lincoln (2011) explain that the present state of qualitative research as a discipline, or the “eighth moment,” as they call it, pushes back on the “evidence-based social movement” (p. 3; referred to above as SBR). The social sciences have become a site of contestation and resistance in which researchers engage in “critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom, and community” (p. 3). In this volume, we are seizing this moment and adding our voices to these critical conversations. The chapters featured in this text represent a methodological proliferation that encourages epistemological diversity, self-reflexivity, and fairness in research praxis. Taken individually and as a collection, they illuminate the ways in which status quo retrenchment can be challenged in multiple ways, in multiple locations, and from multiple perspectives. Part I: (Re)Theorizing Epistemology, Authority, Ethics, and Purpose in Critical Research The chapters in Part I share commonality in that they all challenge epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions about research and forms of representation. However, the ways in which the authors approach their work fall along a vast spectrum of standpoints and methods, which create numerous points of divergence, thus illustrating the methodological and epistemological proliferation that we advocate in the volume as a whole. Opening the discussion, Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard challenge academic institutional review boards as the sole arbiters of research ethics and offer an alternative ethical framework built upon the tenets of decolonial participatory action research (DPAR), which considers ethics as relational and committed to partnership, accountability, and social justice. In Chapter 2, Noah De Lissovoy, Emmet Campos, and Jeanette Alarcon question traditional research relationships in which the researcher maintains

Seizing the “Moment”    xi

a privileged position over research participants and encourage reframing our ways of knowing about research in order to work democratically in partnership with those who participate in research. In Chapter 3, Faith Agostinone-Wilson explores the possibilities of using quantitative research for activism by presenting critical realism as a point of entry for researchers interested in using quantitative research for social justice. Chapters 4 and 5 both examine and challenge the nature of the narratives we tell in presenting our research. P. L. Thomas explores the possibilities of using personal narrative and biography to disrupt typical power relationships in the research process by positioning the researcher as both subject and object of research. Finally, Robert Lake closes the section by illustrating the connections between researcher/researched and reader/writer by using the epistolary genre; through letter-writing, he reveals how a public academic figure is formed as subject through a relationship of self and other. Part II: Critical Research With/In Educational Settings and Communities The chapters in Part II all feature critical research conducted in educational settings and with communities. The authors share a common theme of using research as praxis for empowerment; however, they undertake their endeavors in different ways, in different contexts, and with different populations. In Chapter 6, Patricia Paugh, Jorgeline Abbate-Vaughn and Geof Rose demonstrate that in participatory research, reciprocal, flexible, and locally infused, researchers and teachers can share in the research process and participate as both expert and novice. In Chapter 7, Christina Siry and Carola Mick share their findings from participatory research with elementary-aged students in Luxembourg who documented their science learning via video journals. Next, in chapter 8, Carl James and Leanne Taylor highlight the importance of cultural relevance, reciprocity, collaboration, and trust in their research with at-risk high school aged youth in the United States. Nick Mariner, Allison Anders, and Jessica Lester turn our attention to the effects of nativism on the education of Burundian children with refugee status in U.S. schools. Their chapter blurs the boundaries between research and community activism, illustrating how in this project, it was essential that the two roles inform each other. In Chapter 10, Donna DeGennaro and Rick Duque apply the tenets of critical pedagogy to inform their work with youth in the Dominican Republic who created video ethnographies about their communities. This chapter demonstrates the possibilities and challenges that emerge as youth take charge of their own learning and use video to share their stories. Finally in Chapter 11, Sarah Bell and Mike Cole discuss the potential of using Marxism and feminism

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to conduct antiracist research with Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities in the United Kingdom. Their work embraces life history as a means of conducting research that honors the lived realities of marginalized peoples. References Au, W. (2007). High-stakes testing and curricular control: A qualitative metasynthesis. Educational Researcher, 36(5), 258–267. Au, W. (2010). The idiocy of policy: The anti-democratic curriculum of high-stakes testing. Critical Education, 1(1). Biesta, G. (2007). Why “what works” won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2011). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 1–20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Eisenhart, M., & Towne, L. (2003). Contestation and change in national policy on “scientifically based” education research. Educational Researcher, 32(7), 31–38. Ercikan, K., & Roth, W.-M. (2006). What good is polarizing research into qualitative and quantitative? Educational Researcher, 35(5), 14–23. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Towards a critical pedagogy of learning. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. (2005). Cultural studies in dark times: Public pedagogy and the challenge of neoliberalism. Fast Capitalism, 1(2). Kincheloe, J. L. (2003). Teachers as researchers: Qualitative inquiry as a path to empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge. Kouritzin, S. G., Piquemal, N. A. C., & Norman, R. (2009). Introduction: Pivotal moments. In S. G. Kouritzin, N. A. C. Piquemal, & R. Norman (Eds.), Qualtitative research: Challenging the orthodoxies in standard academic disourse(s) (pp. 1–9). New York, NY: Routledge. Kress, T. (2011a). Critical praxis research: Breathing new life into research methods for teachers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Kress, T. (2011b). Stepping out of the academic brew: Using critical research for breaking down hierarchies of knowledge production. The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(3), 267–283. Lincoln, Y. S., Lynham, S. A., & Guba, E. G. (2011). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences, revisited. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 97–128). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Malott, C. (2010). Policy and research in education: A critical pedagogy for educational leadership. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Shields, C. M. (2012). Critical advocacy research: An approach whose time has come. In S. R. Steinber & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Critical qualitative research reader. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York, NY: Zed.

Seizing the “Moment”    xiii Wright, H. K. (2006). Are we (t)here yet? Qualitative research in education’s profuse and contested present. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(6), 793–802.

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Part I (Re)Theorizing Epistemology, Authority, Ethics, and Purpose in Critical Research

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Chapter 1

Uncollapsing Ethics Racialized Sciencism, Settler Coloniality, and an Ethical Framework of Decolonial Participatory Action Research Eve Tuck State University of New York at New Paltz Monique Guishard Bronx Community College, City University of New York

Abstract This chapter argues that the IRB process is just a small part of what social scientists must consider in conducting ethical research, and that without a more robust consideration of ethics, academe is complicit in expanding, extending, and legitimizing settler colonial projects under the auspices of scientifically based research production. We present an analysis of ethical considerations that are ignored by the IRB process and contextualize what we call decolonial participatory action research (DPAR). Decolonial research necessitates a posture to ethics that frames discussions of ethics away from an emphasis on procedures that attempt to safeguard individual rights and autonomy toward conversations about relational ethics in which partnership, commitment, acChallenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 3–27 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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4   E. TUCK and M. GUISHARD countability, and social justice are its central tenets. Decolonial participatory research ethical concepts are offered as alternatives to IRB-centered ethical analysis, focused on emboldening the public sphere and dismantling settler colonialism. The ethical dilemmas that often surface in qualitative research are not put to rest by scrupulous adherence to the standard procedures for informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality. “Who owns the data?” is an ethical question that participants in laboratory studies do not think to ask. Whose interpretation counts? Who has veto power? What will happen to the relationships that were formed in the field? What are the researcher’s obligations after the data are collected? Can the data be used against the participants? Will the data be used on their behalf? Do researchers have an obligation to protect the communities and social groups they study or just to guard the rights of individuals? —Marecek, Fine, & Kidder, 1997 p. 641

Marecek et al. (1997) speak to the limitations of existing ethical regulatory frameworks for attending to ethical quandaries that often arise in qualitative research. These issues are latent in all academic investigations; the vital questions posed by Marecek et al. should be applied to all scientific inquiry, but too often they are not. To our knowledge, utilizing experimental design or random selection—tweaking the recipe—has never provided an escape from concerns about ownership, interpretation, self-determination, rights/ obligations, and the social justice implications of research. Decolonial theories and Brown1 feminist theories examine systems of global capitalism, White supremacy, and heteropaternalism as features and naturalized outcomes of settler colonialism. This chapter is premised upon the observation that, in much of social science doctoral ethics education in the United States, the discussion of ethics of research has been collapsed, reduced to the discussion of securing approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB). We argue that relying solely on IRB-centered ethical analyses sustains settler coloniality in social science research. We will demonstrate that the IRB process is just a small part of what social scientists must consider in conducting ethical research and that without a more robust consideration of ethics, academe is complicit in expanding, extending, and legitimizing settler colonial projects under the auspices of scientifically based research production. We begin with an analysis of ethical considerations that are ignored by the IRB process. We will present entwined genealogies of the IRB process and of scientifically based research and will map these genealogies onto the historical management of Indigenous peoples and peoples of color via social science research. We will also contextualize what we call Decolonial Participatory Action Research (DPAR). One of the most distinctive and compelling qualities of DPAR is that it exposes ethical worries that are latent in all social science re-

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search. Within this context, we present an ethical framework of decolonial participatory action research in which ethical considerations of reflexivity, expertise, dignity, action, relationality, and theories of change will be engaged as vital components of research as a public science, concerned with emboldening the public sphere. Such a framework is useful in contesting the assumed legitimacy of scientifically based research and also in generating research that is concerned with the redistribution of power, knowledge, and place, and the dismantling of settler colonialism. What Usually Counts as Ethical in Social Science Research Being ethical in mainstream social science research is often characterized as knowledge of and adherence to federal mandates, professional codes of conduct, and ethical principles (Strohm-Kitchener & Kitchener, 2009). Many regulatory frameworks exist that detail the rights of individual human subjects and the responsibilities of academic scientists such as the Nuremburg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, and the Common Rule. Novice academic researchers are taught, primarily through graduate-level ethics courses and online computer-based training, three guiding principles of ethical research: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Respect for persons requires researchers to recognize and regard the autonomy of human research participants. This principle requires clearly informing potential participants about the purpose of research and the nature, potential risks, and benefits of their participation, among other information (confidentiality and privacy procedures), which would allow them to decide free from coercion or consequence whether or not they will participate in research. Under this principle, persons with reduced autonomy (e.g., children, prisoners, and the mentally impaired) are afforded extra protections. The principle of beneficence obligates researchers to protect participants from harm (nonmaleficence), to minimize potential risks, and to maximize potential benefits of their participation. Lastly, the principle of justice involves the expectation that researchers attend to how burdens and risks are equitably distributed in research. Beginning scientists are also educated in and required to comply with additional, albeit more practice-oriented, ethical standards derived from disciplinespecific Codes of Conduct,2 promoted by professional research associations if they are members of and intend to present at conferences sponsored by these associations. Alongside a broad but perhaps shallow education in ethical theory, neophyte researchers are often socialized to construe concerns of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as composing the entirety of concerns of ethical con-

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duct. IRB panels are mandated (by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) to oversee research with human participants under the National Research Act of 1974. The Common Rule, the federal guidelines that direct the activities of the IRB, define research as “as a systematic investigation, including pilot research, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” IRBs are tasked with reviewing proposed research involving “human subjects,” that is, federally funded. Human subjects are defined, under the aforementioned guidelines, as living persons from whom a researcher will obtain “data” through intervention or interaction with the individual or identifiable private information (45 CFR 46). Institutional Review Boards have the authority to approve submitted proposals, request revisions to a protocol, or to disapprove of a project. Decentering the IRB as the Arbiter of Ethics In our experience, IRBs are constituted by dedicated people who care about the ethical conduct of research. They spend much time educating themselves about the ethical framework and concerns of the IRB process and in many cases, are highly trained to work with academic researchers to refine research protocols that protect human subjects from particular forms of abuse. IRB members invest time and thought into exchanges back and forth with applicants to determine appropriate protocols. At the same time, we observe that the emergence of discussions about ethics in social science research, and the establishment of IRBs to monitor ethical research practices with human subjects, were prompted by instances of outright abuse. That is Institutional Review Boards, indeed all ethical regulatory bodies, were created reactively; largely in response to public exposure to instances of outrageous abuse such as the Nazi experiments, Tuskegee syphilis study (1932–1972), the Willowbrook hepatitis study (1966) and the deaths of Jesse Gelsinger in the first clinical trial of gene therapy in 1999 and Ellen Roche in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University in 2001. The Declaration of Helsinki, the statement of Ethical Principles for Medical Research involving Human Subjects, was not advanced until 1964 after the Nuremberg trials and while the men, women, and children of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment were being denied penicillin. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and the Belmont Report were established after Peter Buxtum leaked the details of Tuskegee syphilis study to the press (Jones, 1981). The Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections, which conducts oversight of biomedical and behavioral research with special emphasis on vulnerable populations, was created subsequent to

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Jesse Gelsinger’s death. It was not until the turn of the 20th century—as a result of organizing by women’s health groups in collaboration with activist researchers—that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services established several task forces and initiatives to address the lack of research on American women’s health and the exclusion of women from federally funded clinical trials. In the context of the history of this emergence, it is our contention that the proliferation of ethical regulations are actually attempts by social scientists to reconcile their disciplines with their problematic origins. Said another way, although it is well documented that modern discussions of research ethics rose to prominence in response to instances of egregious abuse, interventions such as the establishment of IRBs did not address the ways in which social science theory and methods are complicit in projects of settler colonialism and White supremacy. They did not address how much of academic research was premised on the dehumanization of some “populations” to establish the superiority and betterment of others. Interventions such as IRBs are reactive and partial rather than proactive and holistic. They represent a system of a priori checks without attempting to balance or disrupt asymmetrical power relationships in scientific inquiry. IRBs treat the symptoms of abuse and not the causes: abidances to logics of settler colonialism, scientific racism, and White supremacy. Institutional Review Boards undoubtedly perform an important task within institutions, but they are primarily concerned with protecting the institution from claims of abuse; thus, robust considerations of ethics of research are elided if we mistakenly think of the IRB approval process as anything more than just a small part of what social scientists must consider in conducting ethical research (Flicker, Travers, Guta, McDonald, & Meagher, 2007). The utilitarian principle-based ethical frameworks that guide IRBs have been heavily criticized by proponents of virtue and communitarian ethics as well as indigenous, feminist, and critical race scholars for many reasons; for being 1. Rooted in individualized, colorblind, Western, and white-privileged conceptualizations of risk which too often discount third party and community risk/stigma. 2. More applicable to positivistic, biomedical, and clinical research designs than to social, behavioral, qualitative, and/or participatory orientations to research. 3. Rarely inclusive of members of the populations under study in the ethical analyses of research risks, benefits, and burdens, and approval and rejection of protocols.

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4. Presumptuous about the moral superiority, knowledge and capacities academic researchers possess compared to the naivete and vulnerability of the researched. 5. Inattentive to a “care perspective” on research ethics and thus prioritizing: generalizable knowledge over nuanced insight, rights over responsibilities, impartial, formal, and abstract principles over subjective, “contextualized”, intimate, and “concrete practices” (Porter, 1999, p. 13). Adherence to formalized regulations and professional codes of ethics cannot be mistaken for adequate touchstones for ethical conduct in decolonial research because these guidelines and the review processes that enforce them have persistently failed to ensure the safety and well-being and respect the knowledge of Indigenous people, people of color, the poor/ working class, and people at the intersections of these heterogeneous communities. Decolonial research necessitates a posture of ethics that frames discussions of ethics away from an emphasis on checklists that attempt to safeguard individual rights and autonomy, toward conversations about relational, dialogical ethics in which partnership, commitment, accountability, and social justice are central tenets. An Analysis of Ethical Considerations That are Ignored by the IRB Process With Norman Denzin, we contend, “Ethics are pedagogies of practice. IRBs are institutional apparatuses that regulate a particular form of ethical conduct, a form that may be no longer workable in a transdiciplinary, global and postcolonial world” (Denzin, 2008, p. 97). If contemplation about the ethics of a project by a novice or expert researcher is concerned about only getting the project approved by an IRB, many important considerations are overlooked. First, IRBs can operate under anemic understandings of respect. In our view, respect for human participants encompasses much more than monitoring informed consent procedures. Respect subsumes the recognition, not the denial of, dignity, sacred knowledges, and counter-storytelling. Researchers who attend to more rigorous notions of respect appreciate that restorative justice is just as important as distributive justice, and researchers are not the only people entitled to or capable of discerning risk. Second, IRBs advance narrow beliefs about who and what needs protection. With Malia Villegas, Eve has advanced a series of recommendations for ethical and responsible research on indigenous land,3 which challenge anthropocentric tendencies of established ethical protocols.

Uncollapsing Ethics    9 We have framed these recommendations in terms of research on indigenous land to include not only research on and with indigenous communities, but also on indigenous human remains and human tissue; our sacred places, flora, and fauna; our stories, histories, literature and art; our knowledge and knowledge systems; and data, including test scores, graduation rates, birth and mortality rates, employment rates, and other life outcomes. The guidelines apply to evaluations of institutions, programs, and curricula. We appreciate that much of research is currently divided between research involving human subjects, and research that does not involve human subjects. Our guidelines apply to both sides of this divide because we contend that it is a false divide. This divide does not apply to how we understand the relationships between people, flora, fauna, and place. They emerge from a belief in the power of life in all its forms; and a recognition that human concerns and benefits must be balanced with the concerns and benefits of other life. (Tuck & Villegas, forthcoming)

Third, IRBs can get in the way of a community’s research needs. This is because, as Monique has observed, IRBs provide guidance regarding ethical procedures not about an ethics of involvement: IRBs and existing ethical regulatory frameworks provide little guidance about how to initiate transparent, democratic inquiry; that is, collaboratively designed, conducted, analyzed, and disseminated in the context of equal partnerships between university scientists and members of disempowered groups. (Guishard, forthcoming)

An account of how a university hindered research in one community is Malone, Yerger, McGruder, & Froelicher’s (2006) Protecting the ‘Hood Against Tobacco (PHAT) project. The project began when university researchers conducted focus groups with community members in order to understand and document their reaction to tobacco industry advertising activities targeting residents of color in two African American neighborhoods in San Francisco. As is common in research on community issues, participants were deeply affected by their participation in the focus groups, particularly the insight into the targeted advertising strategies, and many wanted to share this information with neighbors and “consider smoking cessation.” A community–university research partnership was established wherein some participants agreed to serve as community researchers to investigate tobacco-caused harm in their backyards. The community partners were instrumental in codesigning the study and facilitating a town hall meeting in which data detailing the health effects of tobacco use among African Americans were disseminated. A survey of the community’s perception of resources available to aid smoking cessation and impediments to quit-

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ting was also conducted. The results of the survey revealed that the sale of “loosies” (single cigarettes) sold to residents illegally, was a major obstacle to quitting. This knowledge energized the community researchers, who “decided to conduct a systematic assessment of the proportion of convenience stores in the community that sold single cigarettes in ‘violation of state law’” (Malone et al., 2006). An IRB protocol was submitted to the university to observe single cigarette sales among other activities, but later the community residents, more familiar with their neighborhood, felt that observation was an “inadequate methodology.” The community researchers’ reasoning was that some stores were in areas where loitering could be dangerous, and sometimes there was a long time between sales. They argued that it was impractical to wait around to watch for single cigarette sales. Instead, they wanted to make a single-cigarette purchase attempt and document the result for each store. (Malone et al., 2006, p. 1916)

A modified proposal was submitted, which specified that identifying information would not be collected about the stores, employees, or business owners. It also specified that results would be presented aggregately. The IRB rejected the proposal, admonishing the PHAT-proposed research design as one that would “entrap” store owners to commit an illegal act. The IRB stated it “could not approve any university involvement in ‘illegal’ activity.” Malone and colleagues’ (2006) research is a powerful example of how IRBs and participatory and community researchers might differ in how they evaluate risks, benefits, respect, and protection in research. It is also an example of the ways in which needs identified by community researchers can go unaddressed by an IRB process, because an alternate protocol was not agreed upon. We have encountered many other unpublished examples of the competing interests between communities and IRBs in our consultative work. So far, we have demonstrated that “much ethical terrain is uncharted by official guidelines, such as those of the American Psychological Association or of IRB reviews” (Marecek et al., 1997, p. 641). Next we will map the relationships between settler-colonialism, social science, and scientifically based health research. We will argue that narrow conceptualizations of ethics in research are intended to veil scientific research’s complicity in sustaining White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, racism, and settler colonialism. In the final discussion, we will introduce decolonial participatory action research as an ethical framework with insights for social scientists working across a variety of methodologies.

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The Related Forces of White Supremacy, Heteropatriarchy, and Settler Colonialism Our orientations as a decolonizing theorist (Grande, 2004; Smith, 1999;) and a Brown feminist theorist (Guishard, 2009; Hill-Collins, 2000; Keating, 2008) have prompted us to examine the related forces of White supremacy, heteropaternalism, and settler colonialism in order to locate, in Patricia J. Williams’ words, “his attempt to own what no man can own, the habit of his power and the absence of her choice. I look for her shape and his hand,” (1991, p. 19; emphasis ours). For the purposes of this chapter, we attend to settler colonialism as a core structure (“his hand”) that animates White supremacy and heteropaternalism, although in other analyses, we might engage another part of the triad as the anchor structure. We pay particular attention to the relationships between settler colonialism and the manufacturing of White supremacy. We observe that much of social science, particularly social science on the public sphere, such as in/on schools, prisons, hospitals, and other public institutions, have relentlessly studied her shape, with little more than passing regard for his hand—settler colonialism. In other words, social science has been constructed to be concerned with studying mostly oppressed people, without a simultaneous recognition of settler colonialism as the structure that requires their oppression. Settler colonialism is a form of colonization in which the colonizers come to stay. This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event; settler colonialism is something that persists and defines a society, irreducible to the unfortunate beginnings of a new nation. The viability of the settler colonial nation-state depends on the removal and destruction of the original inhabitants (Indigenous peoples) and the transporting and domination of an outside labor force (chattel slaves). Thus, settler colonialism can be characterized by the simultaneous erasure of Indigenous peoples, and the dehumanization of other peoples, captured and enslaved for labor. Within the settler colonial structure, it is indigenous land, not Indigenous people that holds value; this is why Indigenous people must be removed somehow, be it physically eliminated or displaced, being absorbed, assimilated, amalgamated, or erased culturally (Verancini, 2011, p. 2). Conversely, within the structure of settler colonialism, it is the body or the labor of the chattel slave that is valued, thus she must be kept landless. Verancini (2011) observes that what may constitute labor can change over setting and time, and can include not only labor as physical, but also as spiritual, consumption, sexual, reproductive, and so on. In settler colonialism, the settler is valued for his leadership, ingenuity, and pioneer spirit. We understand the dynamics of the structure of settler colonialism, between those valued for their land (thus erased), their labor (thus contained), and

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their intellect (thus profitable), as dynamics that have shaped settler colonial nation-states, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In the United States (and elsewhere) the structure of settler colonialism has undergirded ideologies of White supremacy, in which white skin and White ways of knowing and being are constructed as both superior and normal (Jordan, Bogat, & Smith, 2001; Martín-Baró, 1994); and heteropatriarchy, in which a particular male and straight gender and sexuality expression is constructed as both superior and normal. Heteropaternalism, then, is the presumption that nuclear domestic arrangements should be the building blocks of the nationstate. Within settler colonial nation-states, White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism are naturalized, regarded as components of civil society. Settler colonial nation-states are typified by a kind of genteel violence, in which the abject dispossession and dehumanization of non-White, not-heteronormative people is so commonplace that it is practically invisible. Importantly, Indigenous scholars have observed that neoliberalism, the force most central to this edited volume, is not a new phenomenon, but an extension of (settler) colonialism (Bargh, 2007; Tuck, 2012). Neoliberal restructuring has focused on building a seamless global market, at the same time diminishing the public sphere in ways that make everyday people more politically and economically vulnerable, more fully exposed to the dips and turns of the speculative market, and ultimately, more poor (Satgar, 2007, p. 65). It is our view that neoliberalism and divestment in the public sphere are part of a very particular trajectory of human thinking (not inevitable) and reflect shared aims with logics of settler colonialism and manifest destiny. Entwined Genealogies Various scholars have connected the origins of their academic disciplines to the maintenance of settler colonialism, and its apparatuses, such as White supremacy (see Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; see also Kelley, 1997, on the sciencing of race and racism). Patrick Wolfe (1999) has traced anthropology’s ideological entanglements and the modes of production of anthropology to their appropriation into settler colonial practice. Wolfe is concerned not with “detain[ing] ourselves with talk of colonial handmaidens or with trying to decide whether particular anthropologists were good guys or bad guys,” but with how the “contoured logic of colonialism can be tracked to the minutiae of individual texts, where authors grapple to contain the contradictions that [anthropological theory] generates, . . . the social effects of the publicizing of their theories,” and the “conditions under which particular theories become suitable for appropriation to political ends” (p. 5). Robert Guthrie (1976) tells the story of the emergence of the field of psychology as a tale in which anthropologists relinquished a portion of their

Uncollapsing Ethics    13

ownership of the study of race, bestowing on the emergent field the “racial systems needed to justify intellectually the existence of difference among human beings” (p. 31). Such schemes relied upon physiognomic (deriving analyses of character from the face or body) impressions of different groups to determine a scale of superiority and inferiority of the races, and involved measurements of skin tone, head size, skull shape, and other countings of bones and teeth. Thus, many of the early activities of the field of psychology were concerned with scientifically establishing/proving White supremacy. Catherine Myser (2003) has excavated the normativity of Whiteness—a marker of location within a social-racial hierarchy—in the history and practice of bioethics (p. 2). Her caution is that, in obscuring the ways in which actions by the first U.S. Congress in 1790 required a person to be White to become a naturalized citizen, the construction of cultural and ethnic “others” to define and delineate Whiteness, and the prominence of discovery of “personal whiteness” (DuBois, 1920), White academics in bioethics and other fields risk “reproducing white privilege and supremacy in our own cultural practice” (Myser, 2003, p. 3). One potential problem in this obscuring is that the dominant White center is never troubled, displaced, or relocated (Battiste, 2008; Myser, 2003; Smith, 1999, 2005). Eve’s (Tuck, 2009a) work has sought to understand how educational research has been consumed by the practice of damage-centered research, in which researchers set about proving how individuals, tribes, schools, and communities have been impacted by deprivation, trauma, and loss. In this kind of research, there is a general belief that effectively documenting damage will convince those in power to give up power and resources, and make needed change. Concerned that such political and sovereign “wins” rarely come through, and that individuals and communities are pathologized and become singularly defined by their purported damage, Eve has observed that such research frameworks operate within colonial theories of power and change (Tuck, 2009a, 2010). Gerald Coles (2007) notes that “forging facts to ‘prove’ and predetermined ‘scientific’ explanation is an enduring stratagem,” (p. 27) of social control. His analysis compares the “misuse” of science by the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s to research and policy practices in the 19th and 20th centuries that were determined to prove the inferiority of poor people and people of color in order to justify unfair social policies. Coles quotes a statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists (2006) regarding the Bush administration’s configurations of scientifically based research, concerned that “When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, political supporters in various Federal departments have been censored and scientific Federal reports whose findings run contrary to the Bush administration policies have been suppressed.” The statement expresses deep worry about the consequences of “distorted

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facts and suppressed truth,” in numerous areas of public safety, about which the Bush administration had ideological differences with widely held scientific findings, including drug safety, air pollution, reproductive health, and global warming (Coles, 2007, p. 28). Coles observes seven methods of “forging the facts,” or methods of manipulation that are comprised in common practices in which data and findings are contrived to support ideological policies that seek to divest in the public sphere. They are: build a procrustean pen; inflate facts; make the meaning of facts acquire a new meaning; refashion no comparison into an informative comparison; misrepresent causation; keep unwelcomed outcomes far away from the procrustean pen; ask the wrong question and thereby avoid necessary facts (pp. 32–41). Taken together, these analyses concretize the ways in which social science research is complicit with logics of settler colonialism, promoting, at times, the projects of Indigenous erasure, the subjugation of peoples of color, and White supremacy. At the same time, under the banner of “scientifically based research,” problematic and unethical practices of contriving findings flourish. Other scholars, including many in this volume, have explored the misinformation, errant policies, and profits made under the promotion of “scientifically based” research practices. Our critique in this chapter scratches at the ways in which methods of academic research, such as those methods outlined by Coles (2007) above, undermine the ethical practice of social science research. An Ethical Framework of Decolonial Participatory Action Research Now we turn to the ways in which participatory action research is counterhegemonic to the ethical modus operandi of much of mainstream social science research. We are especially interested in drawing out the components of what we are calling decolonial participatory action research (DPAR); research that is conducted in and with community, not on communities, and in ways that are anticolonial, not imperialistic. Broadly, participatory action research (PAR) is best understood as an orientation to collaborative research rather than as a particular set of methods. PAR has varied characteristics and promiscuous roots. It may be qualitative, quantitative, and/or mixed method. PAR can be located in communities, the academy, or in co-constructed spaces. PAR involves a continuum of research activities that employ varying modes of participation (from cursory to more thorough) and control between community-based entities and academic researchers (Chataway, 1997; Fals-Borda & Muhammad, 1991; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000).

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Participatory action research disquiets many of the presumptions of mainstream social science research, especially those components of social science that still embrace positivism. In PAR, the following notions are disbelieved: Distance is required between “knower” and “known” to achieve “objectivity”; the researcher has expertise and can observe truths about the subject’s life that she cannot observe; erudite researchers approach their subjects and fields in ways that are unbiased and value free; the purpose of research is “discovery” in order to contribute to a generalizable knowledge base. Instead, participatory action researchers contend that people have deep and significant knowledge about their everyday lives, and that people are complex and have valuable insights about the world and institutions they inhabit. PAR shifts notions of the purposes of research, validity, rigor, and generalizability away from fantasies of discovery toward aims of co-constructing knowledge for social change. We are admittedly skeptical, given the complex histories of our respective peoples with exploitative research, about the role research will ultimately play in achieving social, environmental, and economic justice for all; in dismantling settler colonialism (McKoy, forthcoming; Selden, 1999; Smith, 1999; Tuck & Villegas, forthcoming; Washington, 2006). Yet we firmly believe that participatory research holds revolutionary possibilities for restructuring relationships between academic scientists and communities. PAR projects have been successful in enhancing academic and lay understandings of social theory and practical problems. Our enthusiasm about the possibilities of PAR for disrupting problematic social science research practices, however, cannot be divorced from shared worries. We worry about an overemphasis on the specialness of PAR. We worry about the racist-classist-paternalistic language, practices, and group dynamics of positivistic research and bioethics infecting collaborative inquiry. We worry about PAR being touted as a panacea for the social and ethical dilemmas that confront social science research. Lastly, we worry about the ostensible appropriation and commodification of PAR as federal granting agencies seek to redefine intervention, promoting the use of participatory methods in order to conduct translational research without attention to participatory epistemologies. There is nothing about PAR that intrinsically serves as a cure-all or magic bullet for the many biases and moral quandaries that plague social scientific inquiry, especially those that derive from complicity in relations of settlercolonialism. There can be a general misconception that by simply building participation into a project—by increasing the number of people who collaborate in collecting data—ethical issues of representation and voice, exploitation, consumption, voyeurism, and reciprocity are resolved. The misconception that participation is merely about including more people in the same problematic research approaches doesn’t appreciate that participation

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refers to an epistemological stance, to a set of beliefs about knowing and knowledge. This is why we have differentiated between PAR and decolonial participatory action research in this chapter. Participation can be superficial and performative, and simply increasing the number of bodies in the conduct of positivistic or colonial research does nothing to decolonize it. Although the relationship between the researcher and the participant are intentionally shaped differently in PAR, this difference “does not circumvent ethical dilemmas. Indeed it raises new dilemmas, and these often collide with institutional ethics procedures in especially problematic ways” (Cahill, Sultana, & Pain, 2007, pp. 305–306). By nature of being collaborative, even intimate, concerns of respect, compensation, representation, interpretation, relevance, fairness, and accuracy burst to the forefront in PAR. At the same time that we highlight, we do not want to overstate the special nature of ethical dilemmas within PAR that Marecek et al. (1997) adeptly detail, because PAR exposes ethical concerns that are latent in all social science research. Thus, critically engaging ethical concerns within participatory action research can yield insights for other methodologies of social science research in which negotiations of these concerns may be less transparent. We turn to such an engagement in the next section. Decolonial participatory action research is concerned with emboldening the public sphere and dismantling settler colonialism. Lorenzo Veracini (2011) differentiates settler colonialism from colonialism defined by exogenous domination in that the former is typified by a “persistent drive to ultimately supersede the conditions of its operation,” in order to “‘tame’ a variety of wildernesses, . . . effectively repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous alterities, and productively manage ethnic diversity” (p. 3). It thus, “covers its tracks and operates towards it self-supersession” and cannot be struck down using modes of exogenous decolonization (Veracini, 2011 p. 3). In fact, some strategies, such as the sanctioning of equal rights, have “historically been used as a powerful weapon in the denial of indigenous entitlement and in the enactment of various forms of coercive assimilation” (Veracini, 2011 p. 6). This decolonization “actually enhances the subjection of indigenous peoples” and is “at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental” to Indigenous peoples living in settler colonial societies (pp. 6–7). Thus, the decolonial intervention to settler colonialism will necessarily take a different course than other approaches to social justice. Decolonial PAR is a public science, meaning it seeks to be accountable to real people, to tangible relationships, and it disbelieves the permanence of the settler-colonial nation-state. In part, the project of decolonial PAR is to expose the matrices of settler colonialism and the ways in which neoliberal logic—the most recent iteration of settler colonialism—works to undermine and dispossess the public sphere. It is to make that which is concealed apparent and to attend to the lines of power that course through settler co-

Uncollapsing Ethics    17

lonial nation-states. Decolonial PAR projects are crafted to provide participants and community members with multiple points of entry and multiple opportunities to draw meaning, value, and action from the work. They are designed to have continuity between the research and community life, and for collaboration to move in recursive ways. Decolonial PAR is anticipatory and proactive (not reactive) with respect to ethical quandaries, and composes an ethical framework including components of reflexivity, expertise, humility, dignity, action, and relationality. We now will discuss each of these components in turn. Reflexivity Decolonial PAR is reflexive with respect to many things: about the purpose of research, about the stance of researchers and participants, about theories of change, and about the risks and potential consequences of research. DPAR embodies a critical approach to social science research. It is critical in that it aims to challenge hegemonic paradigms, leaving behind a naive approach to issues of power, and engages in careful self-reflection regarding the possible shadows of its research presence and processes. This reflexivity involves researchers in a critical stance toward the processes and uses of research in the history of their discipline(s), and asks them to be willing to dis-identify with aspects of their training and practice that reinforce the divides a critical participatory action approach questions and works to heal. (Watkins & Shulman, 2008, p. 69)

As we have noted, decolonial PAR can be defined as a web of beliefs about how knowledge is generated and remembered, where it comes from, and how ideas are vetted and revised. Decolonial PAR holds that people have deep, often generational, knowledge about their lives, institutions, places, and communities. Those who engage in this kind of research do so because they believe that collaborative research strategies yield strong and compelling data; that knowledge is more powerful when collectively conceived. Implicitly (but better to make it explicit), decolonial PAR requires researchers and communities to ask and answer, “How do we believe that change happens” (Tuck, 2009b)? Before engaging in research, communities must ask themselves three important questions: What is our theory of change? What role does research have in our theory of change? And what role (if any) might an academic researcher have in this research (see also Tuck, 2009a)? Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “At a common sense level, research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument” (1999, p. 3). To be reflexive about theories of change,

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researchers and communities must consider how the aims of research can be useful to communities instead of academe. Ethical decolonial PAR is also self-conscious about the consequences of a researcher’s actions and the legacy of scientific research products, not just to IRBs, grantors, and academic peers but to human relationships and to social, economic, and environmental justice. It embodies Dillard’s endarkened feminist epistemology, which views “research as a responsibility answerable and obligated to the very persons and communities being engaged in the inquiry” (2000, p. 666; emphasis in original). Without this reflexivity, participatory researchers permit, “the whiteness of ethics to go unmarked, we risk repeatedly reinscribing white privilege—white supremacy even— into the very theoretical structures and methods we create as tools to identify and manage ethical issues” (Myser, 2003 pp. 1–2). Finally, while reflexivity is a core component of doing this work, there are different ways of thinking about how and if expressions of self-reflexivity are represented in public. This idea is taken up further in our discussion of the sacred. Expertise Ethical community-based participatory research interrupts knowledge hierarchies not just in the beginning, but in all phases of a research project (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood, & Eikeland, 2006). Ethical decolonial PAR complicates expertise and takes seriously that lived experience is a powerful location and criterion of meaning (Hill-Collins, 1998, 2001). Michelle Fine writes, Participatory action researchers ground our work in the recognition that expertise and knowledge are widely distributed. PAR further assumes that those who have been most systematically excluded, oppressed or denied carry specifically revealing wisdom about the history, structure, consequences and the fracture points in unjust social arrangements. PAR embodies a democratic commitment to break the monopoly on who holds knowledge and for whom social research should be undertaken. (2008, p. 215)

Said another way, ethical DPAR does not give voice to or build consciousness for marginalized people. It does not presume that before researchers intervened they were previously speechless or that the foundational plains of sociopolitical critique were barren. DPAR researchers do not esteem themselves to be positioned to observe truths or reality more clearly than people in lived lives. DPAR is not merely receptive to community concerns, but profoundly respectful of and responsive to community knowledge and organic expertise.

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Humility Being ethical in participatory research requires researchers to embrace humility; “the ability to balance listening and offering input, and to negotiate rather than impose expectations and roles” (Shore, 2006, p. 11). Humility requires researchers to abdicate the throne of knowing and of moral superiority; to understand that there are unforeseen risks and problems with their chosen methodology, research questions, and modes of informed consent, among other issues about which community partners are more knowledgeable. Humility is an extension of reflexivity, requiring researchers to be more reflective and more transparent about our standpoints as well as the limits of our theories and analytical strategies (Guishard, 2009). If we are serious about decolonizing and democratizing research, we should highlight our blind spots and biases with as much detail as we spotlight the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies of the people with whom we conduct research, because as the late Cynthia Chataway (1997)advised, “This is a method within which the researcher cannot escape vulnerability, nor should he or she try, since mutual vulnerability allows the effects of domination to be reflected upon more accurately and safely.” Humility can be the gateway to mutual vulnerability, assisting decolonial participatory research partners’ recognition of their complicity in each other’s lives. Our colleagues Maria Torre and Jennifer Ayala (2009) call this collision of identities wherein research team members perceive themselves as both we and other choques; “moments of contestation and creative production” that birth knowledge entremundos, between the cracks of multiple experiences, underscoring relationship and interdependence . . . the foundation of a PAR for social justice—one that asks questions at the intersections of daily life and complex social systems; where individuals are allowed to hold varied and contradictory identities. (p. 390)

Dignity Ethical decolonial PAR endeavors to preserve dignity. It does not commodify or appropriate, instead it builds on the existing strengths and talents of community collaborators while assisting in the cultivation of new capacities and skills. Ethical DPAR honors the “self-defining identities of the peoples who have been colonized and oppressed,” and also the private spaces, personal stories, and community knowledge (Smith, 2005, p. 86) to which we are privileged to gain access, document, and bear witness. Collectives formed by researchers, participants, and community members are key,

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and perhaps rare, sites of self-determination, in which members speak what is otherwise silenced, make transparent that which is otherwise concealed, and make meaningful that which is otherwise forgotten or devalued. There is dignity in the work of creating a space for ourselves, the kind of space that has been systematically denied to us. Decolonial PAR also recognizes/cultivates dignity through the practice of what Eve has called “theorizing back” (Tuck, 2009c), which engages everyday people in rejecting and reclaiming theories that have been used to disempower them: “theories that we have mis/believed about ourselves, that have fed our own self abnegation, theories that have made us rely upon, cater to, offer gratitude to, and even congratulate the colonizer” (Tuck, 2009c, p. 120). Theorizing back shifts the gaze of research onto the institutions and structures that maintain settler colonialism. An additional aspect of dignity within decolonial PAR work is the differentiation between the public and the sacred. Research collectives can decide which elements of their work to open source; meaning that the methodology, methods, theory, data, and analyses can be shared and potentially used by others. Materials determined to be sacred can be shared only with community members, perhaps in community newsletters or community forums. They might be talked about, but never written down. They might never leave the research collective. Some examples of private or sacred materials that might never be made public are sacred tribal stories, stories of humiliation that rehumiliate when told, and stories that can serve as examples that reify stereotypes. In part, to consider the public and the sacred is to consider the idea that the academy does not need to know everything, or even most things, uncovered in a participatory research project. There are some stories that the academy has not proved itself to be worthy of knowing. Action DPAR locates action and sustainability as primary and not tertiary or endgame goals of collaborative research (Zeller-Berkman, 2007). It endeavors to sustain transparency in collaboration by describing research methods, agenda, goals, and deliverables in jargon-free terms. Action in decolonial PAR cannot be reserved just for the final stages of a project. Action is vital to a collective’s learning and satisfaction in a decolonial PAR project. It is crucial that action happens early and often, over the course of a project. It is important that the collective decides what constitutes short- and longterm action. Academics often conceptualize dissemination of a study’s findings at conferences and through publication in scientific journals as action while community collaborators do not. One approach is to design research methods to blur the lines between method and action so they are pedagogi-

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cal or provocative and serve as dynamic interventions to unfair practices for all contributors (Tuck, 2009b). Relationality One approach of decolonial PAR is to refuse to make people into objects by making them the subjects of research. The focus of the research is not on people, not on their bodies, but on the relationships between bodies, ideas, and institutions. The gaze is not on people or things, but the spaces between people or things. This intentional change in object relations is one way DPAR may be distinct from other forms of PAR. Relationality is an alchemy of trust, representation, and reciprocity. Decolonial participatory action researchers focus their efforts not on establishing trust but on being trustworthy. Communities, individuals, and tribes may come to a project after having been betrayed by other researchers. Warnings of caution about participating in research are often passed from one generation to the next. Stories, artifacts, and knowledge have been stolen; tissue and blood samples, sacred ideas, and endorsements have been mishandled. Acknowledged or not, this is the legacy of research that social scientists have inherited. To require or expect trust from a community that has been betrayed isn’t useful or realistic. However, a researcher must show herself to be trustworthy by doing what Linda Tuhiwai Smith has called “showing face,” by participating in important cultural events and following “protocols of showing or accepting respect and reciprocating respectful behaviors, which also develop membership, credibility, and reputation” (1999, p. 15). While some methodologies may position the needs of a community as a hurdle or nuisance to research, indigenous and decolonizing approaches tend to approach cultural protocols, values, and behaviors as an integral part of methodology. They are “factors” to be built into research explicitly, to be declared openly as part of the research design, to be discussed as part of the final results of the study, and to be disseminated back to the people in culturally appropriate ways and in a language that can be understood. (Smith, 1999, p. 15)

Trustworthy researchers take the time to grow an understanding of the sociopolitical context of the community partners’ realities, to learn about nuances and comprehend a community’s diversity (Cahill, 2007). They make time for discussion, for negotiation, and to develop mechanisms of transparency and accountability. With community members, trustworthy researchers address issues of representation, which can include discerning the public from the sacred,

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determining how analyses and counteranalyses will be shared, and thinking through issues of authorship. Authorship is highly valued within academe, but may be less or even more valued by a community partner. Authorship is one of the ways that emerging scholars earn a reputation, but also earn reappointment, tenure, promotion, and salary bonuses. Someone who is unfamiliar with academe may not understand how high the stakes of authorship may be for someone trying to make a career in the academy. They may not fully appreciate that a scholar’s career is, in many ways, built upon her publications, indeed, built upon what she says about her research. A trustworthy researcher does not attempt to downplay or diminish the significance of authorship in her own life, but fully discloses the expectations, benefits, and politics of publication. Trustworthy researchers also learn from community partners about what might constitute meaningful reciprocity. Going beyond fast-food gift certificates or other tokens of appreciation that might be encouraged by IRBs, meaningful reciprocity may mean time spent addressing direct needs in a community partner’s life, such as tutoring, advocacy, childcare, translation, even laundry. Meaningful reciprocity can emerge over time as different parties become more mutually implicated in each others’ lives. Concluding Thoughts Having outlined a framework for ethical decolonial participatory action research, one might surmise that these are worthwhile aspirations, but still ask, how exactly does one embody, implement, or ensure ethical decolonial participatory research? One might further question whether we are suggesting replacing one regulatory framework with another, which, albeit well intentioned, represents more laborious ethical review processes that potentially could deter prospective decolonial research projects. There are no simple answers to these questions, and most often, we are left to feel and grapple our way through because, according to Eikeland (2006), “there is hardly an affluence of extant literature on action research and ethics” (p. 39). There are numerous examples of Indigenous communities and urban communities who have developed their own ethical review processes, usually with a board that will approve or deny applications to conduct research (Barnhartdt & Kawagley, 2010; Battiste, 2008; Tuck, 2009a). Such endeavors are concerned with educating IRBs about the ethical particulars of PAR, revising the Belmont Report principles, and cultivating scientific literacies among community members to become involved not only in conduct of research conducted in their communities but also in the ethical review of research. Indeed,

Uncollapsing Ethics    23 formulating regulations and ethical judgments solely on the basis of opinions expressed by experts in the scholarly community and IRB members risks treating subjects like “research material” rather than as moral agents with the right to judge the ethicality of investigative procedures in which they are asked to participate. (Fisher, 1997, p. 2)

Although we wholeheartedly support these initiatives and see research as a crucial topic of community education, our lingering worry is that the creation of parallel regulatory boards, while importantly disrupting the monopoly of academe over research (see Fals-Borda & Muhammad, 1991), does not require academic researchers to reconsider their complicity in settler colonialism. Reiterating our claim from earlier in this chapter, current conceptualizations of ethics have been generated in response to the symptoms of abuse, not the causes, which are settler colonialism, White supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Monique’s current research aims to critically examine social research ethics education for how it primes participatory researchers about how to think and enact respect, accountability, and relationships using a decolonial and Brown feminist framework. It is her position that the ethical deliberations, which most often get written up as field notes outside of formal academic publications, might prove insightful and instructive about how to responsibly conduct ethical decolonial research (Guishard, forthcoming). She hopes to eavesdrop, with permission, on the messy, behind-closed-door conversations PAR researchers often have as we negotiate the ethical quandaries that riddle our research, writing, and theorizing . . . grappling with the politics of collaboration, postionality, accountability, and responsibility. (Cahill et al., 2007, p. 305)

An initial finding of Monique’s current work concerns the promise for participatory action researchers in their positions between the cracks. Borrowing from Borderlands/Mestizaje scholarship, Monique conceptualizes participatory researchers as nepantleras; “in-betweeners,” “those who facilitate passages between worlds” “(Un)natural Bridges” . . . nepantleras are threshold people; they live within and among multiple worlds, and develop what Anzaldúa describes as a perspective from the cracks. Nepantleras use their views from these cracks-between-worlds to invent holistic, relational theories and tactics enabling them to reconceive or in other ways transform the various worlds in which they exist. (Keating, 2008, p. 8)

Excavating nepantlera ethical decision making will hopefully provide a more tangible, less antiquated, less classist, racist, sexist, and homophobic

24   E. TUCK and M. GUISHARD

ethical compass for unsuspecting researchers while traveling what can be “tricky ground” in participatory research (Smith, 2005). In closing, we contend that settler colonialism is not yet adequately acknowledged and addressed within conversations about combating the retrenchment of the public sphere. To prompt the inclusion of analyses of settler colonialism in such discussions, we have used this chapter to map the deep relationships between various social science disciplines, settler colonialism, scientifically based research, and contemporary ethical regulations. As a whole, these relationships have worked to produce research as racialized sciencism that maintains a different kind of status quo than is being defended in this edited volume: that of White supremacy and heteropaternalism, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples. A startling question remains (startling because it is not at all rhetorical, but asked in earnest), is it even possible for academe to reduce or deter its complicity in projects of settler colonialism? Novice researchers need more than one course or a computer-based training and certificate program to learn what they are inheriting in becoming researchers. Novice and expert researchers need a more complete understanding of what constitutes ethical considerations, beyond those basic parameters outlined by an IRB process. Much more needs to be done to reconcile social science disciplines with the settler colonial histories of their emergence. Reconciliation will never be total, as Sandy Grande (2004) observes, “No reparation, no penance, no atonement can ever erase the eternity of genocide” (p. 31). Is there anything rescuable in social science research? Can it be rescued in time to intervene upon the retrenchment and divestment in the public sphere? These questions hang unanswered, and necessarily so, as we do the difficult work of uncollapsing the ethics of social science research. Notes 1. Black and Latina feminist epistemology. 2. American Education Research Association Code of Ethics and American Psychological Association Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct 3. Many would argue that all land is indigenous land.

References Bargh, M. (Ed.). (2007). Resistance: An indigenous response to neoliberalism. Wellington, New Zealand: Huia. Barhardt, R., & Kawagley, A. O. (Eds.). (2010). Alaska native education: Views from within. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Knowledge Network , Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alaska.

Uncollapsing Ethics    25 Battiste, M. (2008) Research ethics for protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: Institutional and researcher responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 497–510). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brydon-Miller, M., Greenwood, D., & Eikeland, O. (2006). Strategies for addressing ethical concern in action research. Action Research, 4(1), 129–131. Cahill, C. (2007). Repositioning ethical commitments: Participatory action research as a relational praxis of social change. ACME, An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6(3), 360–373. Cahill, C., Sultana, F., & Pain, R. (2007). Participatory ethics: Politics, practices, institutions. ACME, An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6(3), 304– 318. Retrieved from: http://www.acme-journal.org/vol6/CCFSRP.pdf Chataway, C. J. (1997). An examination of the constraints on mutual inquiry in a participatory action research project. Journal of Social Issues, 53, 747–765. Coles, G. (2007). Forging “facts” to fit an explanation: How to make reading research support skills-emphasis instruction. In J. Larson (Ed.), Literacy as snake oil: Beyond the quick fix (Rev. ed., pp. 27–47). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Denzin, N. K. (2008). IRBs and the turn to indigenous research ethics. In B. Jegatheesan (Ed.), Access, a zone of comprehension and intrusion. Advances in program evaluation (pp. 97–123). Emerald Publishing Group Limited. doi: 10.1016/ S1474-7863(08)12006-3 Dillard, C. (2000). The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(6), 661–681. DuBois, W. E. B. (1920). The souls of White folk (from Darkwater). In N. Huggins (Ed.), W. E. B. DuBois: Writings [1986.] New York, NY: Library of America. Eikeland, O. (2006). Condescending ethics and action research. Action Research, 4(1), 37–47. Fals-Borda, O., & Muhammad, A. R. (1991). Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action research. New York, NY: Apex. Fine, M. (2008). An epilogue, of sorts. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 213–234). New York, NY: Routledge. Fisher, C. B. (1997). A relational perspective on ethics-in-science decision-making for research with vulnerable populations, by IRB. Ethics and Human Research, 19(5), 1–4. Flicker, S., Travers, R., Guta, A., McDonald, S., & Meagher, A. (2007). Ethical dilemmas in community-based participatory research: Recommendations for institutional review boards. Journal of Urban Health, 84(4), 478–493. Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Guishard, M. (Forthcoming). Excavating nepantla ethics para nosotros. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Graduate and University Center, The City University of New York.

26   E. TUCK and M. GUISHARD Guishard, M. (2009). “The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that”: Participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. Urban Review, 41(1), 85–105. Guthrie, R. (1976). Even the rat was white: A historical view of psychology. New York, NY: Harper Row. Hill-Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Jones, J. H. (1981). Bad blood: The Tuskegee syphilis experiment. New York, NY: Free Press. Jordan, L. C., Bogat, A., & Smith, G. (2001). Collaborating for social change: The Black psychologist and the Black community. American Journal of Community Psychology, 29(4), 599–620. Keating, A. (2008). Shifting worlds, una entrada between and among worlds: Introducing Gloria. In A. Keating (Ed.), Entremundos/among worlds: New perspectives on Gloria Anzaldua (pp. 1–14). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelley, R. D. G. (1997). Yo’ mama’s disfunktional! Fighting the culture wars in urban America. Boston, MA: Beacon. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2000). Participatory action research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 567–605). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Malone, R. E., Yerger, V. B., McGruder, C., & Froelicher, E. (2006). It’s like Tuskegee in reverse: A case study of ethical tensions in institutional review board review of community-based participatory research. American Journal of Public Health, 96(11), 1914–1919. Marecek, J., Fine, M., & Kidder, L. (1997). Working between worlds: Qualitative methods and social psychology. Journal of Social Issues, 53, 631–644. Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCoy, K. (forthcoming). Manifesting destiny: Agriculture as a vehicle of colonization: The case of colonial Jamestown and tobacco. Environmental Education Research. Myser, C. (2003). Differences from somewhere: The normativity of Whiteness in bioethics in the United States. The American Journal of Bioethics, 3(2), 1–11. Porter, E. J. (1999). Feminist perspective on ethics. London, UK: Longman. Satgar, V. (2007). Cooperative development and labour solidarity: A neo-Gramscian perspective on the global struggle against neoliberalization. Labour, Capital and Society, 40 (1/2), 56–79. Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame: The story of eugenics and racism in America. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Shore, N. (2006). Re-conceptualizing the Belmont Report: A community-based participatory research perspective. Journal of Community Practice, 14(4), 1–26. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed. Smith, L. (2005). On tricky ground: Researching the native in the age of uncertainty. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 85– 108). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Uncollapsing Ethics    27 Strohm-Kitchener, K., & Kitchener, R. F. (2009). Social science research ethics: Historical and philosophical issues. In D. M. Mertens & P. E. Ginsberg (Eds.), Handbook of social research ethics (pp. 1–22). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Torre , M. E., & Ayala, J. (2009). Envisioning participatory action research entremundos. Feminism and Psychology, 19(3), 387–393. Tuck, E. (2009a). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–427 Tuck, E. (2009b). Re-visioning action: Participatory action research and indigenous theories of change. Urban Review, 41(1), 47–65. Tuck, E. (2009c). Theorizing back: An approach to participatory policy analysis. In J. Anyon, M. Dumas, D. Linville, K. Nolan, M. Perez, E. Tuck, & J. Weiss, Theory and educational research: Toward critical social explanation (pp. 111–130). New York, NY: Routledge. Tuck, E. (2010). Breaking up with Deleuze: Desire and valuing the irreconcilable. Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 635–650. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2010.500633 Tuck, E. (2012). Urban youth and school pushout: Gateways, get-aways, and the GED. New York, NY: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Villegas, M. (forthcoming). A statement on research that takes place on indigenous land. Veracini, L. (2011). Introducing settler colonial studies. Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), 1–12. Retrieved July 10, 2011, http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/settlercolonialstudies/article/viewFile/239/22 Washington, H. A. (2006). Medical apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. New York, NY: Anchor. Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, P. J. (1991). The alchemy of race and rights: Diary of a law professor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. New York, NY: Cassell. Zeller-Berkman, S. (2007). Peering in: A look into reflective practices in youth participatory action research. Children, Youth and Environments, 17(2), 315–328.

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Chapter 2

Challenging Epistemological Authority in Qualitative Research An Emancipatory Approach Noah De Lissovoy Emmet Campos Jeannette Alarcon University of Texas at Austin

Abstract This chapter argues that critical qualitative research has to consider the epistemological foundations of methodology. The authors investigate the problem of epistemological authority and consider the implications of this problem for the structure of relationships and methods in qualitative research. The chapter proposes a more deeply democratic conception of these relationships, which challenges the assumption that the university is the privileged producer and arbiter of systematic knowledge and argues for the importance of a practical and epistemological collaboration between researchers and parChallenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 29–51 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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30   N. DE LISSOVOY, E. CAMPOS, and J. ALARCON ticipants. The authors illustrate the approach that they propose by describing two university-based studies as well as popular knowledge projects undertaken by a community-based research site. The chapter concludes with a challenge to familiar critical approaches to qualitative methodology to extend their commitments to reflexivity and democratic relationships, and offers an outline of the basic principles of an emancipatory approach to epistemology and qualitative methodology.

Introduction Our chapter starts from the premise that engaging seriously with epistemological issues is essential for qualitative researchers; any effort to articulate a meaningful research practice has to consider the epistemological foundations of methodology. Without confronting the stakes of choices made at the level of senses of knowledge and knowing, researchers’ methodological decisions remain uninformed and haphazard. Research is necessarily a philosophical practice—even if it is an applied one—in which basic questions regarding the nature of science, knowing, and knowers have crucial consequences. Our focus in this chapter is on the problem of epistemological authority—who can legitimately know and who can produce legitimate knowledge—and on the implications of this problem for the structure of relationships and methods in the practical work of research. We propose here an outline for a more deeply democratic conception of this process and these relationships. This account of the ethics of research depends upon a reconceptualization of the politics of epistemology, which both builds on and challenges existing approaches. We begin by describing the theoretical context for this project, which starts from contemporary work in philosophy and cultural studies, as well as scholarship on qualitative methodology. We then illustrate the approach we are proposing by describing two studies undertaken by the authors, as well as through an account of the popular knowledge projects undertaken by a community-based educational and research site. As we describe, an emancipatory qualitative methodology challenges the assumption that the university is the privileged producer and ultimate arbiter of systematic knowledge and argues for the importance of a collaboration between researchers and participants, not only at the level of process and practice, but at the level of epistemology as well. We conclude with a discussion of how our argument builds from familiar critical and alternative approaches to qualitative methodology while also challenging them to extend their commitments to reflexivity and democratic relationships in research, and we offer in summary an outline of the basic principles of an emancipatory approach to epistemology and qualitative methodology.

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Epistemology, Methodology, and Emancipation Theory and Emancipation Mainstream approaches to research, including qualitative research, tend to understand epistemological authority as the property of the researcher. Relationships between researchers and participants are managed in order to maximize the production of useful data and to minimize immediate harm to participants; this is primarily a practical matter, however, and the organization of these relationships is not thought of as having important epistemological dimensions. The researcher generally remains the ultimate arbiter of meaning, and he or she announces the truth of the experiences under investigation. This stance and standpoint have been much interrogated, and many critical currents in qualitative research have questioned the confidence with which dominant science and research have claimed to be able to exclusively know the world. Critics have pointed out that representations of the truth of experience, and of the meanings of others’ lives, are necessarily structured by ideological commitments (McLaren, 2007); that the subject of research (science itself, as well as the researcher) is complicated by the facts of historical, cultural, and social location in much the same way as the object of research (Harding, 1993); and that the claim to know the other disavows the aporia at the heart of signification as well as the way in which research is always already caught in a web of power effects at the level of the text (Lather, 2007). Nevertheless, even these critical and postmodern approaches to epistemology and methodology hold on, in their own ways, to the researcher’s proprietary claim to epistemological authority. The critical conception of knowledge production, which parallels the process of development of consciousness, imagines that understanding passes from a kind of raw to cooked state through the intervention of the intellectual. In general terms, Marxism has conceived of this transition as that of popular understanding into properly scientific historical materialism (Lukács, 1971). Likewise, feministstandpoint theorists have argued that systematic knowledge, even that which is produced as part of the feminist project, must be grounded in an epistemological standpoint which is the result of a refinement into philosophy, by the intellectual, of the insights of ordinary experience (Hartsock, 1998). Within poststructuralist approaches on the other hand, if the authority of the intellectual is troubled, this is less in the name of distributing this authority democratically and more in order to unravel our faith in the very project of knowing, which must continually return (it is argued) to its constitutive failure as the paradoxical ground of its method (Lather, 2007). At the same time, the intellectual/researcher remains in charge of these ruins and of the management of whatever splintered sense inhabits them.

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In this chapter, while building on the powerful insights of familiar critical and postmodern approaches, we argue for a sense of epistemological authority and corresponding research methodology that are more deeply emancipatory. Rather than preserving the final word for the researcher, as mainstream qualitative research does, or emphasizing the failure of the meeting of interpreter and interpreted, as postmodern approaches tend to do, we argue for a more democratic epistemological authority and process of inquiry. This conception would allow for the possibility that participant perspectives and understandings might be authoritative, even in the first instance, and that equal and divergent understandings might be produced or uncovered in the course of research. And it would suggest a model of epistemological authority as plural and complex, identified with the ensemble that is the community of researchers and participants, rather than solely with the researcher. Knowledge production in this conception is identified with a process of democratic experimentation, in which the possibilities for relationship, community, communication, and action are explored and tried out. This involves a challenge to the intellectual, and the university itself, as the privileged ground for systematic knowledge production. Instead, knowledge (and even science) are thought of as emerging from multiple and diverse sources. We do not aim here to present a definitive program, but rather to raise crucial questions and point to important starting points for the project outlined above. Building a more democratic framework and methodology for qualitative research is a collective project that will have to draw from many perspectives and build from a range of existing critical orientations. An important starting point for this reconceptualization of epistemology and methodology comes from recent work in political philosophy concerned with the nature of emancipation. This makes sense, since we argue that mainstream and alternative approaches are limited less by their sense of knowing per se than by their sense of the politics of knowing—by the limits of their imagination of the democratic organization of the community of knowers. Jacques Rancière (1991, 2007) has proposed a conception of emancipation, grounded in the idea of a “community of equals,” which suggests important directions in which our notions of democracy can be deepened, as much in curriculum and teaching as in research on education. For Rancière, emancipation takes place not as a person is led (or invited) along the path of conscientization, but rather in the moment that she or he is freed from bondage to the expert and master and proceeds to learn and know autonomously among a community of equal learners and knowers. Intelligence, for Rancière, is not the property of the elite or the specific achievement of dominant science but is rather prolific and ubiquitous, belonging in equal measure to every mind. This conception is

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powerfully generative for efforts to imagine an emancipatory epistemology and research practice. Our emphasis on the politics of knowing in this chapter is also connected to a focus on the relationship between being and knowing: between ontology and epistemology. We are working to uncover the problem of power in research at a deeper level than that of relationships between alreadygiven subjects or objects; a more emancipatory conception of knowledge and knowledge production depends on a more emancipatory conception of the knower and the being of the knower. On the other hand, challenging the consolidated structure of epistemological authority over the social world also challenges the ontological consistency of that world, as a range of possible worlds emerges in the conversation between diverse and heterodox knowledges. Critical philosophy that understands being as a political problem is helpful in this regard. In particular, Alain Badiou (2001) argues that truth emerges in the moment of a break with the existing order of being, and that the subject of science and politics is constituted by a faithfulness to that break. For our purposes, this suggests that authentic knowing, and the research that produces it, is identified with a basic departure from the given, both from the settled ideas that compose the knowledge of the field (in our case, education) and the familiar subjects of that knowledge (the disciplined academic). In this way, a more emancipatory epistemology and methodology are connected to the project of unraveling and reconstituting of ways of being. Decolonial Research as an Emancipatory Knowledge Project Decolonial research and indigenous methodologies represent another point of departure for working toward a more emancipatory and democratic model of qualitative research methodology. Like other critical approaches, decolonial approaches critique hegemonic practices, but they base their critique on a challenge to the colonial forms of power upon which these discourses are based. Also, like other critical projects, decolonial theories and practices emerge out of new social movements and counterhegemonic intellectual traditions, in this case 20th century and more contemporary anticolonial social movements and intellectual traditions begun by Fanon, Césaire, Du Bois, and others. This decolonial turn in critical approaches makes visible the processes of racialization and colonization that earlier critiques had elided (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argues, decolonial research and indigenous methodologies challenge the monologic theories and practices of mainstream Eurocentric research and knowledge production. The episte-

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mological authority of the latter rests largely on discourse that dismisses other forms of knowledge and research. Decolonial approaches are based on indigenous models that value local perspectives, that are collective and collaborative, and that emerge organically in the course of research (Smith, 1999). As such, they depart from traditional notions of who and what makes up the subjects and objects of research. On the one hand, decolonial approaches challenge the epistemological authority of the intellectual, researcher, and the university itself as the privileged ground for systematic knowledge production. On the other, they also critique the research process as individualistic and distanced from research participants. Decoloniality extends feminist and other critical traditions toward a more emancipatory project by considering how long-standing structures of coloniality persist in determining our modern and postmodern lived experiences (Maldonado-Torres 2007). Similar to Rancière’s (2007) notion of a “community of equals,” which includes participants in a radical epistemological and democratic project, decoloniality proposes a deeply collaborative pedagogical and political relationship between intellectuals and local communities. Decolonial approaches seek to merge activist knowledges produced in spaces outside the university with academic knowledge produced by critics of coloniality (Dussel, 1996; Escobar, 2008; Mignolo, 2005). As such, this work contributes to a collective building of theory that can multiply “the landscape of knowledge production” as “a way of unsettling the megastructure of the academy as knowledge space par excellence” (Escobar, 2008, p. 306). Recent work by Chela Sandoval (2000), for example, articulates an oppositional project based on U.S. Third World Feminism aimed at producing new forms of knowledge, starting from cultural and identity practices that combine local and transnational social and political experiences. Her work, along with other decolonial projects by Chicana/o scholars, is part of a critical discourse that focuses on colonial difference as a key interpretive frame. Decolonial research challenges traditional ethnographic practices that objectify researcher/participant relationships. It aims to disrupt traditional paradigms by modeling more dialogic and collaborative forms of research and validating more critically reflexive research positionalities (Smith, 1999). This reflexivity exposes the contradictions of scholar activist identities and social positions within the neoliberal university. According to Smith, “research is also regarded as being the domain of experts who have advanced educational qualifications and have access to highly specialized language and skills” (1999, p. 125). Decolonial research subverts this relationship by making indigenous communities “experts” and as such producers of meaning. It challenges dominant and even critical anthropologies that perpetuate the notion of researchers as nodes of expert knowledge production and argues for more plural forms of research practice that de-

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colonize expertise. Decoloniality has extended critical, feminist, and poststructuralist traditions in radically democratic directions. In this regard, there are important links between this decolonial work and the possibilities proposed by the trends in contemporary critical political theory discussed above. Above all, decolonial approaches argue that epistemological authority is not solely grounded in the intellectual and the academy but in local knowledges and cultures as well, and that as such, it is fundamentally collaborative and convivial. Moving Toward Emancipatory Methods Lately, the boundaries of qualitative research in education have been pushed by critical researchers who are interested in including cases that represent historically marginalized groups, sharing stories that have been excluded and/or erased, and acting in more inclusive ways as they craft their research findings (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). Researchers drawing upon poststructuralist theories have questioned accepted genres for presenting research findings and broadened definitions for what is considered as data (Britzman, 2003; Lather, 1991). The next step is to extend our thinking by acknowledging and challenging the power dynamics that nevertheless persist in knowledge production. The project developed in this chapter aims to propose more emancipatory methodologies by explicitly decentering the authoritative voice of the researcher. Additionally, acknowledging that research participants already possess agency creates the space for constructing more equitable relationships between researchers and subjects. Stake’s (1995) foundational idea that “the case is an entity” with a unique life broadens the field of educational research by arguing for the validity of studying individual cases in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of social phenomena. The evolution of case study methodology has come to emphasize the desired outcome of deepening understanding about the case. Instead of privileging broadly generalizable outcomes, case study not only allows scholars the space for deeply investigating cases that may have otherwise been overlooked but also allows for a more inclusive and collaborative participant/researcher partnership. Additionally, the emphasis on understanding and uniqueness draws the attention of the researcher to the obligation she/he has to craft a representation that is at the least mutually agreed upon. Qualitative methodology scholars (Merriam, 1998; Stake 1995; Yin, 2003) recognize that mutual agreement between the researcher and case study participant is a starting point for moving participants’ voices to the fore of any representation of their lives, situations, and experiences. Scholars who enlist case study methods seek to avoid what Rossman and Rallis (2003) term the “seduction and abandonment” treatment of re-

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search participants by building reciprocity into the data collection and interpretation phases of the research project. This is often done by including the participant(s) in the act of transcript review, participating in activities in the research environment, and/or committing to action research. Nevertheless, we assert that even in this tradition, the researcher often co-opts the story via the interpretation and presentation of knowledge. Over time, educational researchers have made gains in their pursuit of the acceptance of qualitative methods as legitimate research. The field has been further broadened during the past several decades as the boundaries of qualitative study have been extended, including greater representation of marginalized groups and the creation of space to consider alternative forms of data. Although these moves forward are significant, we believe that an authentically emancipatory methodology remains under construction. We further this work by highlighting the ways in which research projects can move in this direction in actively seeking to eliminate the distance between the lived experience of research participants and the knowledge produced by scholars that currently persists in educational scholarship. In other words, instead of conducting fieldwork in a traditional sense and working toward traditional forms of interpretation, emancipatory methodology seeks to deepen the dialogue between researcher and participant by treating the participant as intellectual expert in his/her own experiential situation and in regard to the knowledge produced by the research itself. While we do not claim to fully answer this call for change, we do believe that we offer a starting point here that can add to the discussion by highlighting the interconnectedness between lived experience and research as we examine the ways knowledge is enacted in the lived experiences of participants. In a move toward the emancipatory epistemology we are calling for in this chapter, we share ways in which accepted methodology in educational research can and should be stretched beyond the selection of sites and participants to include meaningful ways for research participants to gain ownership of knowledge produced via sharing both their lived experiences and their understandings of those experiences. Beginning with the time-honored case study and turning toward the potentially liberating projects of oral and life history work, we show the ways in which these accepted methods should be challenged and extended. We build on an awareness of the importance of the researcher’s own critical self-consciousness of his or her process in planning and carrying out research and producing new knowledge (Plummer, 2001). This emphasis is significant because it reminds us that the researcher persists in controlling the ways in which projects are designed, implemented, and interpreted, as well as how and to whom the final product is disseminated. The studies described below expand research relationships by treating the participants as partners in constructing new knowledge while also acknowledging the expertise of each participant re-

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garding his/her life experiences, understandings, and ways of knowing/ being. In seeking more equitable ways of illuminating participants’ stories, we suggest that life story research provides one space for greater inclusion of voices and understandings. Furthermore, extending the depth of collaboration is also made possible by incorporating oral history methodology since in this approach, as Thompson (2000) makes clear, the researcher must accept the informant as expert and “give priority” to what he/she says rather than “what the researcher wants to hear” (p. 39). Educational researchers have become increasingly open to broadening understandings of educational settings so that more and different versions of knowing might be drawn upon in the construction of understanding. Broadened, too, are the ways in which researchers interact with participants, analyze data, collaborate with participants, and represent findings (Plummer, 2001). These are initial steps toward equalizing intellectual projects and honoring different ways of knowing and being. As Portelli (1991) points out, “only equality prepares us to accept difference in terms other than hierarchy and subordination” (p. 43). This applies to the project we propose here, in that by actively seeking different perspectives, we aim to further expose the role of power in research methodology while highlighting approaches that seek to invite participants into the center of knowledge construction. We suggest that given this expanding inclusion of participants and settings, participants’ roles in collaboration should shift from mere corroborators to more central and respected roles such as author, interpreter, and/or expert. Because this move requires a deeper contemplation of researcher motives and expectations, it potentially results in deeper understanding of the power dynamics that persist in the field of qualitative research. As we have mentioned, in drawing upon decolonial scholarship, we acknowledge that social science itself is a colonizing project. Against the coloniality of dominant research approaches, the projects described in this chapter demonstrate the ways in which researchers can seek to include informal educational settings in conversations about countering official knowledge production, treating community members as intellectuals, and centering the voices of teachers and students in the interpretive story of schooling and in working toward a shared intellectual project. These goals are especially relevant to an emancipatory methodology based on a broader view of what counts as authentic knowledge. Reframing Researcher Positionality: Reflections on Our Own Practice This section reflects on two of our own research projects in order to consider how more emancipatory approaches to research inquiry might be

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imagined and practiced in education and related fields. We reflect on our own work and describe the ways in which it expands the notion of epistemological authority beyond the researcher/intellectual, as well as how it democratizes relationships and methods that structure the inquiry process. We consider our own experiences as researchers as we struggle in our work to move our practices in more democratic directions. Our own work seeks a more emancipatory approach principally through new modes of engagement and through the building of more convivial and nonhierarchical relations between researcher and participant that not only treat participants as equal partners in the research process but even as legitimate authors, interpreters, and experts, such that they become co-producers in the construction of new knowledge. Building a Community of Equals in Research To illustrate the critical research principles we have outlined above, we first describe a study, undertaken by one of the authors, Emmet Campos (2011), of several activist educational organizations in Central Texas. This study described the work of youth and community projects in order to capture grassroots and vernacular forms of teaching, learning, and research. Participants in the organizations that Emmet studied conduct activist educational work based in working class Mexicana/o and Chicana/o communities using an array of critical pedagogical approaches. These educators generated conceptual and investigative tools such as encuentros and coyunturas, community learning exchanges, and place-based teaching practices in the service of locally situated communities. Literally translated, encuentros means communal encounters or gatherings; these are modeled on the Intercontinental Encuentros, organized by EZLN activists in the 1990s in Chiapas, Mexico, in which hundreds of activists convened to resist NAFTA policies locally and capitalist globalization in general. Coyuntura refers to an analytical process and popular education strategy that builds on Latin American activism and the work of Paulo Freire, which “links research, analysis, reflection, action, and community empowerment by encouraging participants to name, define, and narrate their struggles” (Manolo & Braggs, n.d., Introduction section, para. 1). This process expands our notion of what counts as authentic knowledge and extends autonomous forms of knowledge production created by youth and community projects in the direction of struggle and direct action. This study was based on a long relationship nurtured through years of active participation in the work of these activist projects. Even before conducting this research, Emmet had spent many years working alongside other members on educational and political projects. Rather than a “drive-by”

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research approach based on disengagement from one’s subject of study, this research was based on active participation in the pedagogical and political work of these organizations. This approach to the study of one’s participants implies a research model “that does not shy away from explicit political involvement,” as Vargas has argued (2008, p. 164). In fact, participants in these spaces were already modeling more democratic relationships through forms of practice that articulated nonheirarchical, collaborative, and dynamic interaction. Emmet’s (2011) research project sought to replicate these relationships, which entailed continual self-reflection and negotiation with participants in these spaces. To this end, he worked to position participants as equal collaborators in the research process, at various stages incorporating their perspectives on research design, data collection, and analysis. For example, he dialogued with participants throughout the process in face-to-face meetings, as well as via Skype, e-mail correspondence, and telephone conversations. These encounters served to help collectivize the research process and refine the analysis. His ethnographic practice sought to nurture and replicate the same collaborative relationships in his day-to-day work. Since he had been involved in participant work, his field notes captured at greater depth the intricacies and complexities of activities, as well as their challenges to forms of hierarchical practice. One of the most successful projects Emmet studied, undertaken by an organization in South Texas, was the creation of “Community Learning Exchanges.” Starting from local sources of popular wisdom and knowledge, these exchanges have helped to build a network of community-based social justice networks that act as empowered and active change agents in their local contexts. It is this model of democratic and collaborative praxis that served as the inspiration for his own research practice. This study sought to enact a convivial research approach that repositioned researcher and participant as equal partners in the research process. This process expressed, in its own sphere, the way in which teaching and learning in these educational sites was undertaken by a “community of equals” (Rancière, 2007). For instance, poetry and writing workshops with youth of color at one of the sites (a bookstore in Austin, Texas) used student-focused approaches that centered youth language, culture, and voice, based on an ethic of care for youth of color that acknowledged student knowledge as central to learning experiences. This approach to teaching was evident as well in youth-led initiatives like those conducted at another activist educational site in which students and local community members collaborated on participatory action research projects. Emmet was a longtime and committed participant at these sites. His research grew out of and was crucially shaped by his work with these organizations and represented one aspect of a broader commitment to their projects. The convivial relationship structures created at these sites, and the epistemological author-

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ity validated through practices grounded in local cultures, facilitated the emergence of new knowledge useful to the local community, and served as a methodological model for his own research. This study strove to concretely enact a more equitable set of inquiry practices by grounding the work in an ethics of social justice in which outcomes are driven in the final analysis by community concerns. While this methodology borrows from feminist and critical research that seeks to generate findings to support local communities, this study sought to press against the boundaries of familiar approaches. In particular, it was founded on and grounded in local standpoints, as well as on the lived experiences of participants as the basis for understanding and changing social phenomena. This approach foregrounds a thick form of oral history that validates local wisdom as well as local linguistic and cultural practices. Furthermore, it starts from a commitment to fostering collaboration with community organizations seeking social justice. This implies an extension of research practice and emphasizes a more active participation in the community one studies or observes “such that observation becomes [merely] an appendage of the main activity” (Vargas, 2008, p. 175). Growing From Roots in Life History To further illustrate the principles we have described in this chapter, and to show how they build from and also push beyond familiar critical case study research, we describe another study by one of the authors (Jeannette Alarcon, 2012), which focused on charting the life history, from the ground up, of a middle school in Central Texas. Like many life history projects, this one drew upon many data sources in order to contextualize the history and environment of the school. However, privileging the teachers’ stories created the space to gain an internal understanding of the lived experiences within the school. Jeannette interviewed 12 teachers who worked in the school across several decades and analyzed the way in which educational policy, staffing, physical surroundings, discipline procedures, demographic shifts, and district boundary lines impacted the space of the school. School environments and learning spaces are created, shift, and change because of these forces. Describing the identity stories of the teachers was a central goal for both past and contemporary historical moments. Life history and oral history can potentially foreground the voices of participants, as opposed to the researcher solely determining the course of data collection and representation (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995; Tonkin, 1992; Wolcott, 2005). In this study, this principle enabled a glimpse into the teachers’ perceptions of the professional and remembered self, which informed identity production while also contributing to the collective identity of the school itself.

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This study started from the principle that oral histories are valuable because they add alternative perspectives, present counterhistories, and fill in the stories of groups who have been erased by the dominant culture (Thompson, 2000). Building upon this premise, Jeannette acknowledged that she was not a neutral reporter of these stories. As Cary (2006) points out, “Bringing to bear this postmodern turn on life history research means the author (and the storyteller) may no longer claim universal truth or the neutral translation of reality” (p. 25). This complex understanding of oral history research implicitly calls for a collaborative process of analysis that involves participants. The teachers’ stories became the entry point for understanding how historical events impacted not only professional teaching practice but also the collective memory and identity of the school. VanMaanen (1988) encourages researchers to “continue experimenting with and reflecting on the ways social reality is presented” (p. x). Because the school itself was not a living being able to report its own story, the researcher continually faced the problem of choosing which voices would be privileged in representing the school. Instead of claiming “realist” representations, the study wove together the voices of the teachers to construct the narrative of the school environment, culture, and identity over time. In this case, while the researcher was still the author of the written text, she closely collaborated with the teacher participants in order to bring their understandings to the fore. This methodology worked to center teacher voices as authoritative instead of as a secondary data source. This commitment was connected to Jeannette’s decision to focus on the voices of teachers, as opposed to the voices of administrators and other members of the school community typically seen in more authoritative roles. The researcher shared with participants common themes as they emerged and met with the teachers in informal settings that affirmed their identities and voices (for example, at social gatherings in which teachers were the main participants). Participating in these encounters enabled the researcher to better understand the complex nuances of building a professional identity and of relationships among the teachers, and how they contributed to the production of the school environment over time. Another goal for the project was to understand “how the participants constructed themselves in relation to the categories laid on them” (Lather, 2007, p. 40). Because schools live through a series of historical moments, it is important to understand the ways in which teachers enact, react to, and become a part of these moments. For example, this school experienced separate phases of integration via busing, in the first place in response to federal mandates, and more recently as a result of provisions in No Child Left Behind. The teachers recounted the ways in which the administration communicated these changes to them as well as the ways in which the teachers came together to provide systems that would support students in the

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changing environment. These stories provide a glimpse of the important impact that power structures within and around the school’s environment have on the ways in which teachers carry out the business of school. As Jackson (1968) points out, schools are often taken for granted. Foregrounding the ordinary experiences of teachers, within crucial historical moments, allows us to begin to understand the complexity of schools, a complexity that is often overshadowed by the external voices of policymakers, researchers, and the media. This project built on familiar practices while also challenging critical and poststructuralist approaches to move toward more emancipatory outcomes. The premise of the project itself resists common-sense notions of the narrow limits of life histories, asking participants to narrate the story of a place that constituted a crucial part of their lived experience. Suggesting that the school possesses a life of its own works against the notion that schools are static and recognizable to everyone, thereby situating the school in a new way. During one interview, a teacher stated that she viewed the school as a “living, breathing entity.” Her comment illustrates the idea that although school structures remain recognizable over time, they also change as societal expectations, demographics, and policy change. Through an examination of these processes, firmly grounded in the standpoint of teachers, this project allowed for an examination of the power structures that have influenced schooling over time. This research project pushed beyond traditional case study methodology in its conscious valorization of the ordinary practices, daily lives, and perspectives of teachers. In this era of standardization, in which policymakers, administrators, and citizens seek replicable programs and guaranteed outcomes, starting from the standpoint of teachers themselves is crucial for developing a richer and more politically empowering understanding of the ways in which school environments take shape. In the process, the institution of school moves beyond merely the focus of the case and itself becomes a subject and agent, suggesting that an institution possesses its own complex life. Students and Community Members as Researchers and Intellectuals The kinds of emancipatory research we describe in this chapter are being explored as much outside of the university as within it. In this section, we describe one community-based educational and research project—the Llano Grande Center—whose work is expanding epistemological authority in new ways. This research center, based in the predominantly working class Mexicana/o Delta region of South Texas, is transforming this community’s social and educational institutions through its grassroots cultural

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and political work. Youth and community members are enacting new kinds of epistemological authority in their research projects for social change. We offer this example as an instance of community-based research that is challenging the authority of academic research models and their structures of practice and moving them toward the kinds of emancipatory principles that we have outlined above. In addition to the critique of epistemological authority, the work of this center challenges unexamined assumptions about ways of being that have underwritten familiar approaches to qualitative research and ethnographic practice. The Llano Grande Research Center (LGC) is a community-based education research center located in the Delta region of South Texas in one of the poorest counties of Texas. The center was founded in 1997 by two brothers, Francisco and Miguel Guajardo, who began to envision ways of addressing many of the social and educational problems that this Mexicana/o working class community has faced due to structural constraints of race and class oppression over many decades. The LGC has gained national recognition for its work with student leadership development, oral history, economic development initiatives, and precollege advising. LGC educators strive to center the voices of youth, teachers, and historically marginalized communities through vernacular and place-based strategies of instruction and research inquiry. These practices are based on critical race and gendered epistemologies that validate Mexicana/o ways of knowing, and privilege this subaltern standpoint. In particular, youth involved in the LGC have conducted research projects in their local communities using digital technologies to capture the stories of community elders and family members. LGC youth have digitally archived over 200 oral histories that have become part of their curriculum in high school history classes and represent a critical alternative to official textbook histories. The stories they capture honor the voices and memories of local elders and function as a historical and cultural corrective to the dominant historical narrative that shapes common-sense perceptions of Texas history. Collectively, they narrate a complex and ambivalent history of conflict between Mexicano and Anglo communities. One community elder captured the essence of that conflict and transformation in the expression desenraizando el valle, or “clearing the valley,” which symbolically captures the social, cultural, and physical displacement of Mexicano communities by Anglo settlers and land developers. Desenraizando is both a metaphor for the sense of loss and diaspora of this South Texas Mexicano community as well as a reference to the material and physical displacement it has endured as a result of capitalist development at the turn of the 20th century. The individual and collective histories that these LGC youth capture in their digital projects supplement the more academic revisionist historiography produced by recent Chicana/o scholarship. Their stories underscore the

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role that Mexicanos played in the development of South Texas as it was transformed from a rancho economy to a commercial agricultural center (Montejano, 1987). The research that these archived narrative histories represent is tied to an ethics of social justice that promotes development of youth and community while also symbolically empowering them not as consumers of knowledge but rather as knowledge producers (Guajardo, Guajardo, & Casaperalta, 2008). This community-based digital history, facilitated by new social networking technologies, is utilized, as Miguel Guajardo (1997) puts it, to prevent el desenraizo II. Assuming new and empowered identities as researchers and producers of authentic knowledge, for these students, reverses a whole set of unequal social relationships in their communities. This project has fostered new subjectivities and identity practices for youth and community members; it helps them to “become researchers and creators of knowledge, and it inspires teaching and learning practices that identify injustices . . . through oral histories, life histories, ethnographies, genealogies, and storytelling sessions” (Guajardo et al., 2008, p. 17). The narratives and testimonios of community elders collected by LGC youth, in addition to serving as a starting point for new classroom curriculum, have led to economic development projects and have drawn attention to local policy and community issues. In their words, LGC participants reconstitute the research process and “use it as a pedagogical tool, an organizing strategy and community-building venture” (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2004, p. 504). The LGC has pushed the boundaries of critical practice, creating collaborative forms of inquiry, teaching, and learning based on critical race and genderbased epistemologies. These emancipatory senses of research and teaching foster new forms of conversation, dialogue, and community action that link the spaces of classroom and community. The material effects of these initiatives are changing social relationships between youth, teachers, and community members. As a result of the LGC’s community-based research and education projects, the Mexicana/o community that it serves has been transformed in many substantive ways. What began as a successful college preparation program has developed into a more comprehensive teaching and learning project that focuses on building strong relationships, developing youth leadership, and fostering community development for social and educational change. In addition to the archival project that supports their research and teaching initiatives, the process of research study and data collection fosters intimate and ongoing interactions between youth and elders in the community. The digital storytelling project, in particular, has brought youth and their grandparents together to address generational and language barriers that fragment families and communities.

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The LGC’s place-based approach privileges story and narrative inquiry as the basis for research versus the narrow “evidence-based” approaches derived from Eurocentric and logicoscientific forms of knowledge creation. As scholars like Smith (1999) have noted, narrative research that values stories as valid forms of knowledge can build from indigenous ethical, ontological, and epistemological positions. LGC participants are creating a space in which communal and narrative approaches to education research decenter foundational epistemologies and methodologies that underwrite most traditional research practices. This unique research practice pushes beyond senses of critical and culturally relevant pedagogy by linking students, community, and teachers within a “community of equals” in the sense that Rancière (2007) has proposed. The LGC models a more radically collaborative research inquiry model that not only challenges positivist models of research that value individualistic, disinterested, and hierarchical researcher/participant relationships but also proposes more equitable and convivial forms of intellectual work and pedagogical praxis: We’ve gotten to the point where the Llano Grande’s work is an idea and it is a way of life. We didn’t have the language at that point, language has always been very clumsy, so I think for us we got to a point of using a different way of knowing. Emotionally, we understood that the collective was much more powerful than the individual. There was this collective development, this collective learning, and this collective leadership being constructed. (Guajardo interview, March 2010, original emphasis)

Guajardo articulates an emancipatory sense of epistemological authority that starts from a local, indigenous standpoint and challenges orthodox conceptions of knowing and being. This means capturing residual cultural practices, making use of the resources of critical disciplinary knowledge, and allowing new intellectual identities to emerge. In this way, the LGC links an epistemological project to the political project of creating new communities based on collective and nonhierarchical practice. This approach to social analysis implies that researchers seek methods that center local voices. As an ethical orientation, this research approach seeks to honor the vernacular cultural wisdom and knowledge of the communities in which we work as activists and researchers, in order to enact social and educational change. Discussion: Toward an Emancipatory Epistemology and Methodology The orientation to critical qualitative research that we have attempted to sketch out in this chapter links methodology to reflection, and knowledge

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production to transformative action. These emphases are not new, but rather continue on a path laid out by a number of streams within critical methodology. In the United States, it is perhaps feminist methodology that has most powerfully laid the groundwork for the emancipatory project we have described here, and most closely anticipates our own emphases. For several decades, feminist social science researchers and philosophers of science have systematically constructed an alternative methodology, or set of methodologies, that challenge patriarchal and authoritarian understandings of research and have emphasized, by contrast, principles of reflexivity, consciousness raising, collaboration, caring, and action (Fonow & Cook, 1991); underlying this orientation to research has been a basic “tendency of feminists to reflect upon, examine critically, and explore analytically the nature of the research process” (Fonow & Cook, 1991, p. 2). While a range of critically oriented approaches to research have emphasized the political nature of knowledge production, this feminist emphasis on reflexivity regarding the lived texture of research processes and relationships is a particularly crucial starting point for our own argument. In this chapter, we have sought to develop this political and intellectual commitment in the context of contemporary conditions. However, truly honoring a commitment to the principles mentioned above means challenging some of their original formulations; in this regard, the differences between the approach we have outlined and influential feminist ones are instructive. In particular, while feminist methodology has challenged dominant approaches to research, including qualitative research, and the kinds of authority they enact, the collaboration it has emphasized has been essentially methodological rather than epistemological. In other words, this tradition has worked to rearticulate relationships between researchers and participants while essentially preserving the last (epistemological) word for the former. According to Acker, Barry, and Esseveld (1991), in their important feminist analysis of research relationships, Recognizing the objects of the research as subjects in their own right suggests that researchers must take care not to make the research relationship an exploitative one. . . . But this aim poses an ongoing contradiction; ultimately the researcher must objectify the experiences of the researched, must translate that experience into more abstract and general terms if an analysis that links the individual to processes outside her immediate social world is to be achieved. (p. 136)

From this perspective, knowledge production is ultimately dependent upon a process of objectification that divides the “researcher” and the “researched,” and which retains for the former the prerogative of deciding the truth of the experiences under investigation. And even feminist-standpoint theorists, as noted earlier, have generally constructed the experiences of or-

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dinary women (and others) as the starting point for intellectual work, while not thinking of these experiences as generative of systematic knowledge in their own right. By contrast, we aim to recognize the legitimacy of vernacular understandings as more than raw material. As the product of sustained reflection on experience, these understandings are not essentially different from the knowledge produced through official and university-based research. Within our conception, the project of research shifts away from a refinement of the ordinary into the scientific and toward the production of dialogue between differently positioned participants, including the researcher him/herself. The research projects undertaken by the authors that are described in this chapter aim to foreground the authority of research participants in this regard. (Indeed, in Emmet Campos’ study described above, “consultant” is used rather than “participant” as more accurately reflecting the role of those involved in addition to the researcher). Importantly, this authority is not just an ethical category, pointing to the privilege that everyone should have in making sense of their own lives, but is also epistemological: we argue that vernacular accounts (and the accounts of research participants specifically) are already capable of social scientific validity before being sanctioned by academic scholarship. The research practices of the Llano Grande Center, as we have described, work in the first instance to collect and re-present this ordinary knowledge, the knowledge of the community, rather than to collapse it into a truth that is recognizable as such by the academy. The deracination of epistemological authority from its seat in the university is a difficult political project, which coincides with the effort to confront the Eurocentric determination of knowledge production more generally, and decolonial approaches such as that of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) point the way forward for all of us, as we have described. We add to this effort the argument that in addition to undoing the colonization at the level of culture and knowledge of indigenous forms by the West, we should begin to undertake a challenge to the academy’s monopoly on science more generally. Recognizing the validity of vernacular understandings is deeply connected to a rethinking of the relationship between “researcher” and “participant.” Rather than conceptualizing the researcher as producer or even refiner of knowledge—gleaned from the rough material that is the data offered by participants’ lives—an emancipatory conception of collaborative research insists on the shared activity of understanding and interpreting, within which the researcher instigates a process that does not belong to only her or him. Qualitative research has importantly experimented with reframings of research relationships; and, as we have argued above, certain methodological strands, such as life history, are crucial starting points and resources for democratic conceptions of qualitative methodology. But just

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as recent scholarship has proposed a more democratic and decentered conception of critical teaching (De Lissovoy, 2010; Lewis, 2008), so too in the research process it is important to move toward more deeply collaborative conceptions and practices. Describing a new form of democratic political organization, Hardt and Negri (2004) write, The swarms that we see emerging in the new network political organizations, in contrast, are composed of a multitude of different creative agents . . . The members of the multitude do not have to become the same in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. (p. 92)

Similarly, it is perhaps possible to think of researchers and participants alike as composing a kind of researching “network”; this does not level the differences of experience and positionality that exist between the different actors involved, but rather points to the possibility of drawing on this diversity toward a more epistemologically powerful and democratic model of research. Within this network, a basic equality of being, intelligence, and authority (Rancière, 1991) does not obviate differences of perspective and standpoint (particularly between university-based researchers and community members), but it does insist on the mobilization of these differences toward emancipatory ends rather than authoritarian ones. In conclusion, our discussion in this chapter suggests the following basic principles: (a) Emancipation is not just an “external” or public project, but an internal one as well, which touches on the realms of being and understanding. In rethinking qualitative methodology, and the forms of epistemological authority that underwrite it, we are engaged in an important political project. (b) A corollary of this principle is that critical research itself should be thought of as one front of a broader liberatory struggle and should accompany practical projects for social change rather than being separated from them. (c) In this process, emancipatory epistemology and methodology aim not only to respect research participants’ perspectives and understandings but also to recognize them as just as authoritative as those of the researcher (though differently situated), with regard to the questions or experiences being investigated. (d) Connected to this reconfiguration of epistemological authority is a reorganization of relationships that pushes beyond reciprocity and in which research relationships are characterized by a deep collaborativeness and equality among all participants. These principles can be enacted in diverse ways, and in diverse projects, of which we have given several examples above, but we believe that they should inform any qualitative methodology in the present that aims to be truly critical and liberatory. What we have proposed here can be thought of as an attempt to hold critical research traditions to their own ethical, methodological, and politi-

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cal commitments, and to that extent as continuous with these traditions. However, insofar as enacting a truly emancipatory commitment implies basic shifts in our senses of the politics of knowledge and the organization of research relationships, our proposals can be understood as a departure from familiar assumptions in qualitative methodology. Certainly, moving methodological theory and practice forward toward more liberatory possibilities itself requires the contributions and collaborations of many different perspectives; we hope that our intervention here both provokes and contributes to that crucial conversation. References Acker, J., Barry, K., & Esseveld, J. (1991). Objectivity and truth: Problems in doing feminist research. In M. M. Fonow & J. A. Cook (Eds.), Beyond methodology: Feminist scholarship as lived research (pp. 133–153). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alarcon, J. (2012). Life in the middle: Exploring culture and identity in an urban middle school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas-Austin. Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil. London, UK: Verso. Britzman, D. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of leaning to teach. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Campos, E. (2011). Crucibles of cultural and political change: Postmodern figured worlds of Tejana/o Chicana/o activism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas-Austin. Cary, L. (2006). Curriculum spaces: Discourse, postmodern theory, and educational research. New York, NY: Peter Lang. De Lissovoy, N. (2010). Rethinking education and emancipation: Being, teaching, and power. Harvard Educational Review, 80(2), 203–220. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2000). Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dussel, E. (1996). The underside of modernity. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities. Escobar, A. (2008). Territories of difference: Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fonow, M. M., & Cook, J. A. (1991). Back to the future: A look at the second wave of feminist epistemology and methodology. In M. M. Fonow & J. A. Cook (Eds.), Beyond methodology: Feminist scholarship as lived research (pp. 1–15). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guajardo, M. (1997). “Desenraizando el valle”: “Clearing our lands” in South Texas. Llano Grande Journal, 1(2). Guajardo, M., & Guajardo, F. (2004). The impact of Brown on the Brown of South Texas: A micropolitical perspective on the education of Mexican Americans in a South Texas community. American Educational Research Journal, 41(3), 501–526.

50   N. DE LISSOVOY, E. CAMPOS, and J. ALARCON Guajardo, M., Guajardo, F., & Casaperalta, E. (2008). Transforming education: Chronicling a pedagogy for social change. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 39(1), 3–22. Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity?” In L. Alcoff & E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist epistemologies (pp. 49–82). New York, NY: Routledge. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York, NY: Penguin. Hartsock, N. (1998). The feminist standpoint revisited and other essays. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hatch, J. A., & Wisniewski, R. (Eds.). (1995). Life history and narrative. New York, NY: Routledge. Jackson, P. (1968). Life in classrooms. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York, NY: Routledge. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lewis, T. (2008). Defining the political ontology of the classroom: Toward a multitudinous education. Teaching Education, 19(4), 249–260. Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 240–270. Manolo, & Braggs (n.d.). Coyuntura. Retrieved February 23, 2012, from http://mitotedigital.org/ccra_dev/coyuntura McLaren, P. (2007). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Merriam, S. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mignolo, W. D. (2005). The idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the making of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of life 2: An invitation to a critical humanism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Portelli, A. (1991). The death of Luigi Astulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (K. Ross, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J. (2007). On the shores of politics (L. Heron, Trans.). London, UK: Verso. Rossman, G., & Rallis, S. F. (2003). Learning in the field: An introduction to qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, UK and Dunedin, New Zealand: Zed/University of Otago Press. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Challenging Epistemological Authority in Qualitative Research    51 Thompson, P. (2000). The voice of the past: Oral history (3rd ed). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Tonkin, E. (1992). Narrating our pasts: The social construction of oral history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. VanMaanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vargas, J. (2008). Activist scholarship: Limits and possibilities in times of Black genocide. In C. R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (pp. 164–182). Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolcott, H. F. (2005). The art of fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Yin, R. K. (2003). Case study research: Design and methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Chapter 3

On Considering Quantitative Research Faith Agostinone-Wilson George Williams College, Aurora University

Abstract This chapter asserts that there is a place for quantitative methodologies among critical theory research and that they should not be rejected outright. First, a brief overview of common critiques of positivist research is presented, followed by examples of qualitative research in the service of empire and capitalism to illustrate that interpretivist research isn’t immune to these influences. Next, critical realism is discussed as a possible epistemological opening for those who work with empirical methods while also opposing the status quo as part of their activist identity. Finally, aspects of existing critical quantitative scholarship are highlighted to illustrate that this is a growing movement within educational research.

Overview Typically, graduate students face two choices when selecting from the major research paradigms: qualitative or quantitative. Some argue that mixed methods is not simply a combination of qualitative and quantitative, but its Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 53–67 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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own methodology, providing a third option (Creswell, 2007; Denzin 2009). Yet these options presume certain goals and characteristics that lend themselves to stereotypical thinking in terms of researcher roles and personalities. The common wisdom is that if one wants to come across as stoic, objective, scientific (or is writing a grant), then quantitative research is the best choice. If one desires to portray empathy, feelings, critique existing practices, or pursue social justice goals, then qualitative research should be selected. Sweeping, funded, large-scale research projects are quantitative; smaller, focused, service-oriented projects are qualitative. There seems to be little room for critical quantitative researchers other than in the outpost of mixed methods, as long as they don’t stray beyond including the occasional open-ended question on a survey or conduct more appropriate, structured interviews. Part of this is due to the expected rhetoric of research writing. Qualitative writing emphasizes thick description (Geertz, 1973) and the first person, although third person is sometimes used. Quantitative writing is technical writing and always done in third person; to use first person would be suspect. Yet, as Carter and Hurtado (2007) along with Elliott (2005) challenge, why isn’t there room for the autobiographical voice in quantitative research writing, as there is in qualitative? They believe that not only should theory be tested by quantitative research, it should also reveal long-term goals of the researcher, what they support, and why. Similarly, Carter and Hurtado propose quantitative scholars become involved in action research projects and use epistemological lenses such as critical race theory as part of study design and analysis. Likewise, critical feminist theory is part of Kinzie’s (2007) research into the educational pathways of women who enter or leave the science and math fields. Using the first person in the introduction of her study, she connects her interest in the topic of women in math and science careers directly to her own background and advocacy for women’s representation in these careers. Within Marxist, feminist, queer theory, and critical theory scholarship, qualitative research already has an established presence and is the de facto methodology of choice. Part of this is justifiably attributed to the development of interpretivism as a reaction against logical positivism/empiricism, an offshoot of the social activism of the 1960s and 1970s (Gobo, 2005). Even though qualitative research has been in existence for over 100 years, it wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars became more responsive to groups previously made invisible by positivist methodology. Therefore, those selecting interpretive paths such as critical race theory, dialectical materialism, indigenous pedagogy, and the like have a strong foundation of methodological work with which to support one’s own research decisions. In this chapter, I assert that there is also a place for quantitative methodologies among critical theory research and that they should not be rejected

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outright. Playing off an old expression, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bar graph! I say this as a professor who teaches qualitative research courses at the doctoral level and whose scholarship reflects a classical Marxist perspective. First, I present a brief overview of common critiques of positivist research, followed by examples of qualitative research in the service of empire and capitalism to illustrate that interpretivist research isn’t immune to these influences. Next, I discuss critical realism as a possible epistemological opening for those who work with empirical methods while also opposing the status quo as part of their activist identity. Finally, I highlight aspects of existing critical quantitative scholarship to illustrate that this is a growing movement within educational research. Critiques of Positivist Research Despite the recent revival of quantitative inquiry through the Scientifically Based Research (SBR) movement (Denzin, 2009), positivist research continues to be critiqued on the basis of a variety of epistemological and social concerns. This section examines three in particular, as they tie closely to what goes on in schools: that quantitative methodologies and conceptualizations have dominated educational conversations, that empirical and positivist research erases the individual and is itself a colonial discourse, and that traditional empiricism positions itself as the only route to Truth (with some critics questioning the existence of Truth). These are worth mentioning briefly in turn. According to Luke (2011), the discourse of accountability has dominated conversations about directions we should go within educational institutions, wherein, “The normative, the ethical, the cultural . . . have quietly slipped from policy discussion, overridden by a focus on the measurable, the countable, and what can be said to be cost efficient and quality assured” (p. 368). Certainly quantitative research has contributed to this neoliberal assault on the private sector by facilitating overt and covert silencing of those who raise concerns about moving away from concerns about equity to a narrowing of discourse to “standards” and “efficiency,” with the occasional nod to “improvement,” a concern that St. John (2007) shares. According to Elliott (2005), positivism has been critiqued for obscuring the individual person by privileging larger sample sizes and longitudinal data. She categorizes five major ways by which the individual is obscured: denying uniqueness and complexity, neglecting the role of biography, not acknowledging agency on the part of people, not addressing the social construction of knowledge, and not considering how people reflect on their experiences. Starting with her classic 1991 work, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern, Lather (1991, 2007, 2009) has

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sustained her critique of empiricism, primarily on the basis of its patriarchy and colonialism: I read this as a dinosaur culture of master narratives struggling to retain dominance against what is perceived as a major splintering, disintegrating, and fragmenting effects of the partiality and plurality of contesting voices, all of which are presented as threatening chaos/anarchy. The “crisis” these high priests of Western culture perceive is to their continual hegemony over the production and legitimation of knowledge in the name of national heritage and the legacy of Western civilization. (Lather, 1991, p. xvi)

Krenz and Sax (1986) view quantitative research as incapable of discovering truths, let alone Truth. Instead of moving theory forward, empirical research appears to be unable to offer much that is useful to education. To cope with this inability, many important epistemological questions are ignored or set aside in pursuit of a narrow range of “doable” topics. The continued focus on what is directly measurable has left quantitative researchers with a quandary, since most social phenomena are the result of a combination of factors that cannot be isolated or easily measured. For Krenz and Sax, this means that researchers are left with roughly the same amount of “certain” knowledge about how the world works that their greatgrandparents possessed! Qualitative Research in the Service of Capitalism At the same time, there is a tendency within the interpretivist research community to portray qualitative research as automatically more ethically minded than quantitative methodologies (Denzin, 2009; Kvale, 2008). Brinkmann and Kvale (2008) label this misrepresentation as a form of qualitative ethicism, in which interpretivists proceed from the assumption that their particular methodology is morally superior in its own right to empirical ones. Kvale (2008) reminds us that interactive, community-minded research methods, such as focus groups, can and are often used for product research or the election of political candidates who support business and empire. As Denzin (2009) warns, “qualitative researchers cannot claim a mantle of ethical superiority. They must be vigilant in terms of how their methodologies are used by neoliberal regimes” (pp. 301–302). Concerning pedagogy, Gibson (2000) asserts, “methods are tactics, substance is strategy” (para. 81). In other words, a method relied on by itself is no guarantee against bad practice. Case in point: creative, engaging, handson teaching was used to instruct the Hitler youth in the form of outdoor education, role-playing, and community building. Whether we are talking about classroom instruction or research, we have to have more than just the

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false assurance that selecting qualitative research as a methodology automatically ensures a support for emancipatory principles. In many instances, this is not the case. The CIA, for example, has enough faculty research collaborators in the United States to make up a sizable university (Zwerling, 2011). With their recent efforts at recruiting students from multicultural populations (in order to train spies who can more easily blend in), one has to assume that not all of the collaborating faculty who work with these students specialize in quantitative methodologies. Patton’s (2002) Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods text is used in many educational research courses at the doctoral level; I use it in my own qualitative class, and students reference it quite often in constructing their study designs. It is a highly reputable text, well organized, and includes depth of coverage along with compelling excerpts. Several international qualitative research efforts are presented as ethical counterexamples to the traditional quantitative model of research being “done to” rather than “done with” people. In one discussion, Patton describes Farming Systems Research and Development (FSRD), a qualitative and mixed-methods offshoot of systems theory used post-WWII to target agricultural growth in less developed countries. Contrasting it with older, failed models of research used in these countries, he highlights positives of FSRD, including its being interdisciplinary, team oriented, collaborative, and flexible with all stakeholders’ views considered. What Patton doesn’t mention explicitly is that FSRD is utilized by “research projects” of the World Bank, in the form of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CIGAR) (Collinson & Feldstein, 1995; Poats, 1991). Patton (2002) also presents a storytelling account of another agricultural development program used in Australia. Qualitative researchers hired by the program collect testimonials from small farmers, transcribe select examples representative of “most significant change,” and present them to project funders, labeled “key influentials” (p. 196). Patton’s excerpt describes a dairy farmer’s experiences with becoming involved with a debtreduction program and its impact on his productivity and ability to (hopefully, if all goes well) retire by age 55. Below the testimonial excerpt are comments made by the funders in reaction to the account. One of the comments is quite notable in light of the philanthrocorporatism running rampant these days: “The story showed strong evidence of attitudinal change, leading to self-improvement and goal setting. These people will be high achievers and reap the rewards. They will be good role models for others who desire similar rewards” (p. 198). Here, the process of using qualitative storytelling is conceptualized as if the entire process is automatically team oriented, taking place on an even playing field, with equal participation as part of the deal. Nowhere is capitalism addressed with qualitative researchers being pressed into the service

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of mega–factory farms, which have systematically disenfranchised and displaced the very small farmers that are the focus of NGO and World Bank research projects (Clapp & Fuchs, 2009; Vallianatos, 2006; Vivas, 2011). Bezunah, Ames, and Mabbs-Zeno (1995) critique Zambian development projects as working against sustainable agriculture, in which chemical fertilizer purchases have increased, along with soil erosion. Farmers are pushed into high-productivity, capital-intensive “solutions” that often throw them into debt and dependency. “Collaboration” therefore takes on a deeper meaning, but probably not in the benign ways that Patton (2002) envisioned. In addition to the field of agricultural development, the use of storytelling has attracted a plethora of corporate motivational authors including Denning (2001, 2011), Schreyögg (2005), Brown (2005), Gabriel (2000), and Boje (2008). Denning (2001) was a senior executive for the World Bank and heavily involved in the transformation of their “knowledge management” department during the 1990s, an experience he outlines in the introduction of The Springboard. What troubled Denning wasn’t the World Bank’s notorious reputation, but that it remained mired in information archiving rather than the larger, flexible field of knowledge management. His documentation of the miraculous acceptance of storytelling as knowledge policy for the World Bank is the work of a master propagandist. For Denning, a story should strike the listener as self-generated so that it will become part of the way in which the listeners see their lives and work and the identity of the organization in which they work. The fresh idea is not one that pre-exists and is simply being transmitted. An idea cannot easily enter into the listeners’ basic perceptual framework as a fresh idea through which they could view the world, unless they themselves co-create it. For this purpose, a story that rings true can be a useful tool. (p. 39)

It can only be expected that qualitative methodologies like these will be used to put a human face on privatization and the neoliberal agenda, something we are already seeing with emerging approaches like philanthrocapitalism, endorsed by celebrities like President Bill Clinton and Bono from U2 (Bishop & Green, 2008; Bishop, Green, & Clinton, 2009). Critical Realism Within positivism, critical realism provides an opening for those quantitative scholars who seek to explore issues of context more deeply than within traditional empiricism. As a positivist epistemology, scientific realism asserts that there are given sets of rules and conditions within the natural world that exist outside of our understanding or comprehension of them

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(Psillos, 1999). Realists who study the social world also assert that there are givens about how people act and behave and patterns of human action that can be comprehended and understood. Critical realists carry these assumptions further by arguing that while there may be certain stabilities to how the world operates, many social processes are governed by human-made factors, which often work in support of capitalism and are therefore not neutral (Fairclough, 2010; Niiniluoto, 2002; Stage, 2007). Rather than being unchanging, these factors can be altered by the actions of humans. The critical-empirical approach can be compared with the scientific method on several other counts. St. John (2007) views the identification of competing claims to be a fundamental concern of critical realism, whereas the scientific approach tends to stop with the defining and testing of a hypothesis. Instead of the goal being the verification of claims, critical quantitative researchers seek actionable conclusions in order to change existing situations, which leads to moving theory forward. By constantly critiquing existing theory in the formation of conclusions and recommendations, critical research is less vulnerable to instrumental manipulation and/or influence by funders and policymakers, as are traditional scientific models of inquiry. Stage (2007) posits that traditional quantitative research, with its central focus on developing accurate statistical tests based on prior research, often end up replicating status quo conceptions of different phenomena in the social world. She provides a hypothetical example below of how quantitative modeling could be enhanced by taking on a critical perspective: A graduate student observes underlying assumptions in sociological causal models. She notices that by failing to take into account family income, empirical research consistently problematized (stigmatized?) single motherhood. Her quantitative dissertation controls for income to examine the relationships of single motherhood and single fatherhood to various educational and social benchmarks for children. (p. 8)

Here we have a commonly researched topic, that of causational relationships between the family and student achievement, yet it is cast in an alternative light. Instead of treating single-parent families themselves as an automatic social deficit, the addition of the variable of income immediately transforms a status quo dissertation into a more complex, layered one. Likewise, Kinzie’s (2007) inquiry into another commonly researched topic—the gender gap in math and science classes/careers—doesn’t treat the decision to pursue a career in science as a “natural” choice from an open array of options equally available to all. Traditional research approaches lend themselves to the development of policies to enhance female “interest” in science as opposed to directly confronting sexism or acknowledging

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that the career pathway to science is more materially difficult for women due to a lack of affordable childcare, for example. As Kinzie explains, Rather than simply examining these factors and labeling them as deficiencies in women, or worse, ignoring the presence of sexist structures and seeing women’s choice to leave science as about intrinsic interests, a critical view reveals the constraints and proposes ways to alter disciplinary practice and policies in science. (p. 90)

The strength of Kinzie’s approach lies in her openness to reinterpreting existing data, another hallmark of critical realism. Therefore, critical realism refers not only to specific research goals but to a mindset one has when presented with any kind of data. Critical Quantitative Research—Some Examples At the same time as qualitative research has been co-opted by capitalism, many quantitative, mixed-methods, and postpositivist qualitative scholars have found their methodologies being used to support conservative interests, such as being placed under the umbrella of Scientifically Based Research (SBR) (Denzin, 2008). There seems to be an assumption that if one is a quantitative researcher, one is conservative and/or works in tandem with capitalism. Yet there exists a growing movement of positivists who work from a critical perspective across a range of fields including the sciences, medicine, and education. Based in the UK, the Radical Statistics Group was formed in 1975 to support quantitative researchers and scientists who investigated problems through the lens of Marxism and social justice. While not a formal academic organization, they have a peer-reviewed journal, newsletter, and hold a yearly conference to disseminate research and discussion about an array of topics encompassing public health, the environment, pharmaceuticals, and poverty. They assert that statistics have been misused in the service of capitalism and take a stand against the following: The mystifying use of technical language to disguise social problems as technical ones; the lack of control by the community over the aims of statistical investigations, the way these are conducted and the use of the information produced; the power structures within which statistical and research workers are employed and which control the work and how it is used; and the fragmentation of social problems into specialist fields, obscuring connectedness. (RadStats, n.d., para. 3)

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What sets critical quantitative researchers apart from other positivists is how they approach planning studies and drawing conclusions. For example, Carter and Hurtado (2007) discuss when to use group comparisons versus a group-specific focus, which has important implications for studying minority populations. The issue of generalizability is also a critical quantitative concern in that sometimes reform measures are not capable of being applied to the “average” school setting. The key is tying analyses back to context with an eye toward the unexpected departures from otherwise smooth results. These departures can often be an emerging clue as to when theory needs revision. Similarly, critical statisticians are interested in nontypical responses or missing data. Simpson (1998) points out that the high nonresponse rates of sociological surveys often contribute to misleading interpretations. For example, response rates are lowest among the unemployed, migrants, younger males, and in densely populated urban areas. The homeless are rarely counted. At the same time, Simpson explains that wealthy people of any country are also less likely to respond to government surveys, especially if they do not depend on national services and are able to influence policy in other ways. The cumulative consequence of missing data has important implications for underreporting, such as unemployment statistics, fertility rates, homelessness, and voter registration. Perhaps the greatest potential power of critical quantitative research in education lies in its ability to effectively counter the capitalist, SBR movement. In many ways, the forces that created No Child Left Behind and its latest incarnation, Race to the Top, rely on teachers and professors, many of whom are themselves math-phobic and turned off by statistics in general (Trujillo & Hadfield, 1999; Widmer & Chavez, 1982), to remain marginalized and always on the defensive. While we who support authentic assessment alternatives may be able to clearly state the rationale for opposing standardized testing on a variety of fronts (leads to teaching to the test, student disengagement, racism, etc.), it is rare that educators carefully dissect faulty positivist research on its own terms. Researchers whose critical quantitative work takes on education reform efforts, such as recent attacks on teacher certification, include Nichols and Berliner (2007); Laczko-Kerr and Berliner (2002); Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, and Heilig (2005); and Bracey (2006). Although these researchers also use qualitative approaches in their bodies of scholarship, they are also adept at applying statistical analyses to critique studies that are often used to prop up school choice policies. The methods they use to deconstruct mainstream educational research are valuable to share with research students, even if they are pursuing a qualitative path. As a key example of superior analysis, Briggs and Domingue (2011), associate professor of education and doctoral student (respectively) at the

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University of Colorado, were prompted to respond to an August 2010 article that ran in the Los Angeles Times citing statistical research in support of a “fairer” practice of measuring the effectiveness of teachers, known as “value-added modeling” (Felch, Song, & Smith, 2010). Value-added modeling predicts district test scores, based on five variables: last year’s test scores, gender, Title I status, English language proficiency, and date of starting kindergarten. These predicted scores are then subtracted from that year’s current scores. Any gains or losses are therefore attributed to the effect of the teacher. The Times article asserted that value-added modeling was therefore superior to previous formulas of teacher evaluation based strictly on resultant test scores, which didn’t account for variances such as student background. These older models were then being used unfairly for acrossthe-board decisions regarding employment, promotions, and merit pay throughout the Los Angeles School District. Value-added modeling had great promise for silencing the critics of standardized testing while appeasing those who demanded accountability. Buddin (2010), senior economist at the RAND Corporation, independently tested the value-added model mentioned in the Times article and wrote an unpublished paper based on results of analyzing Los Angeles’ school district data. This is the report that Briggs and Domingue (2011) used as the focus of their sustained critique, using critical quantitative methodology to deconstruct several of Buddin’s (2010) major conclusions, along with challenging as a whole the notion of value-added modeling as an example now held up as “new-and-improved.” It is an example that I present in our Introduction to Research class when we address quantitative methodologies and why it is important to have statistical literacy. Briggs and Domingue (2011) examined the existing evidence for theoretical strength that Buddin (2010) cited in support of value-added modeling and replicated Buddin’s analysis using the same district data. Immediately, they found several areas . . . in which their replication results conflicted with Buddin’s conclusions. For example, Buddin’s analysis dismissed teacher qualifications as having an insignificant effect on student performance, which isn’t surprising considering that the school-choice movement, one of the RAND Corporation’s key projects, endorses alternatives to traditional teacher certification such as Teach for America. Buddin’s conclusions also took as an assumption that students are assigned randomly to any given classroom. Additional sensitivity tests done by Briggs and Domingue (2011) illustrated that contrary to this assumption, students were not randomly assigned, particularly when it came to reading instruction. Buddin’s valueadded model did not account for one of the key factors that are beyond teachers’ control—which students end up in their classrooms. Ultimately, Buddin (2010) was presuming factors on the part of the valueadded model, working off of the assumption that these same factors were

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within a teacher’s individual control, when in fact, they were not. At the same time, Buddin dismissed the notion that traditional certification had a bearing on teacher effectiveness when Briggs and Domingue (2011) demonstrated otherwise. Apparently, effectiveness ratings depend on the type of statistical modeling initially used in basing teacher ratings on standardized test scores. In fact, Briggs and Domingue determined that there is a substantial risk for false positives (teachers who are not really as “excellent” as rated) and false negatives (teachers who are really “excellent” being rated average or below average) when using a less conservative statistical standard in value-added modeling. Kovacs (2011) found similar problems with valueadded modeling in his review of existing research concerning Teach for America candidates, which was summarized in a Washington Post article. Briggs and Domingue (2011) conclude their analysis by making several significant dialectical points about evaluation in general and applied causation in particular when it comes to school reform, which is worth quoting at length below: The Buddin white paper presents a picture that implies a have your cake and eat it too scenario: that from a technical standpoint we know how to validly isolate the causal effect of a teacher, and from a policy standpoint we know how to create an incentive structure that winnows away the ineffective teachers while rewarding the effective ones enough to encourage new ones to enter the field. This picture is an illusion. Causal inference may well be the holy grail of quantitative research in the social sciences, but it should not be proclaimed lightly. When the causal language of teacher—effects or effectiveness—is casually applied to the estimates from a value-added model simply because it conditions on a prior year’s test score, it trivializes the entire enterprise. And instead of promoting discussion among parents, teachers and school administrators about what students are and are not learning in their classrooms, it seems much more likely to shut them down. (p. 21)

These conclusions steer the reader to examine the core issue of power inherent in high-stakes testing (in this case, applied to the hiring and firing of teachers) rather than remaining mired in the endless identification and replacement of “ineffective” teachers, which is often a code policy talking point for ending teachers unions (Weiner & Compton, 2008). Taking on the corruption of the Reading First panel led by Reid Lyon, Strauss (2005), a linguist and neurologist, uses empirical research to debunk several of the key assertions of the neophonics movement that dominates “recommended” literacy curriculum endorsed by No Child Left Behind. He not only puts forth that phonics is designed to create a compliant, conformist workforce, he demonstrates how phonics runs counter to how the brain actually works in processing words and sounds. Strauss concludes that even though the National Reading Panel claims to model itself on the

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most stringent of empirical research designs—the double-blind controlled trial used in the pharmaceutical industry—they don’t follow the protocol for weighing risks against benefits that the drug industry also uses. For example, nowhere in their reporting is any information about the harm of phonics and testing mentioned, nor is there any effort to rigorously test for negative effects in a systematic manner. Conclusion For Strauss (2005), debates within education are ultimately about the foundational issues tied to democracy: The struggle against high-stakes testing in reading and elsewhere is a defense of democracy in teaching, a form of academic freedom, because it recognizes that curriculum is a joint undertaking among teachers, parents, and students, and that judgment, not script, plays the key role in deciding on the flow of a classroom lesson. (p. 185)

Yet students and their parents/guardians who are subjected to mind-killing standardized tests, direct instruction, and other gimmicks often do not have the means to effectively confront these impositions. The same is the case for new teachers who are trying to survive their first few years in the classroom. This is where critical educational research can play a role. In particular, critical quantitative researchers have the potential to have the most impact when opposing dominant educational policies. Policymakers assume a general illiteracy on the part of the populace about statistics, so they are able to get away with misuse of quantitative methodologies. This misuse can be in the form of deliberately ill-designed studies or the inaccurate reporting of methodologically sound studies. Critical statisticians are able to readily comprehend quantitative methods and can more easily detect problems in design and interpretation. They can also translate these concepts for those not as adept at empirical research. When presented with a cogent, mathematically sound critique, it is very difficult for collaborating corporate-sponsored researchers to maintain the façade for very long. They can no longer level baseless charges such as those who oppose standardized testing are doing because they oppose assessment. Instead, they have to respond to effective critique on the basis of positivist research, not on ideology. And they are likely to fail in the long run under the light of scrutiny. In this respect, there is indeed a place for quantitative research under the rubric of criticalist epistemologies. Ultimately, it might be wise to heed Luke’s (2011) call for a more informed approach to research rather than arguing about which methodology is better:

On Considering Quantitative Research    65 The question is not one of a binary of science or superstition, measurement or chaos, quantitative or qualitative truths. It is a question of what will count as science—whether and how a generalizable science is possible, what its principled uses and grounds are, what it can teach us, and what that science ignores and places at risk (p. 376)

References Bezuneh, M., Ames, G. C. W., & Mabbs-Zeno, C., (1995). Sustainable agricultural development using a farming systems approach in Zambia. Ecological Economics, 15(2), 149–156. Bishop, M. & Green, M. (2008). Philanthrocapitalism: How the rich can save the world. London, UK: A & C Black. Bishop, M., Green, M., & Clinton, B. (2009). Philanthrocapitalism: How giving can save the world. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Boje, D. (2008). Storytelling organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bracey, G. (2006). Reading educational research: How to avoid being statistically snookered. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Briggs, D., & Domingue, B. (2011, February). Due diligence and the evaluation of teachers: A review of the value-added analysis underlying the effectiveness rankings of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers by the Los Angeles Times. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/ publication/due-diligence. Brinkmann, S., & Kvale, S. (2008). Ethics in qualitative psychological research. In C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research in psychology (pp. 261–279). London, UK: Sage. Brown, J. (2005). Storytelling in organizations: Why storytelling is transforming 21st century organizations and management. Maryland Heights, MO: ButterworthHeinemann. Buddin, R. (2010, August 31). How effective are Los Angeles elementary teachers and schools? Retrieved from http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27366/1/MPRA_ paper_27366.pdf Carter, D. F., & Hurtado, S. (2007, Spring). Bridging key research dilemmas: Quantitative research using a critical eye. New Directions for Institutional Research, 133, 25–35. Clapp, J., & Fuchs, D. (2009). Corporate power in global agrifood governance. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Collinson, M., & Feldstein, H. (1995). From field to lab and back: Women in rice farming systems. Washington, DC: CIGAR Gender Program. Creswell, J. (2007). Qualitative inquiry and research design. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Darling-Hammond, L., Holtzman, D. J., Gatlin, S. J., & Heilig, J. V. (2005). Does teacher certification matter? Evidence about teacher certification, teach for America, and teacher effectiveness. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(42), 1–50. Denning, S. (2001). The springboard: How storytelling ignites action in knowledge-era organizations. Maryland Heights, MO: Butterworth-Heinemann.

66    F. AGOSTINONE-WILSON Denning, S. (2011). Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Denzin, N. (2009). Qualitative inquiry under fire: Toward a new paradigm dialogue. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. Elliott, B. (2005). Using narrative in social research: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis. New York, NY: Longman. Felch, J., Song, J., & Smith, D. (2010, August 14). Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids? Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-meteachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in organizations: Facts, fictions, and fantasies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York, NY: Basic. Gibson, R. (2000). Methods for social studies: How do I keep my ideals and still teach? Retrieved from http://richgibson.com/Methods.htm Gobo, G. (2005, September). The renaissance of qualitative methods. Qualitative Social Research, 6(3), Article 42. Retrieved from http://www.qualitativeresearch. net/index.php/fqs/article/view/5/11 Kinzie, J. (2007). Women’s paths in science: A critical feminist analysis. In F. Stage (Ed.), Using quantitative data to answer critical questions (pp. 81–93). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Kovacs, P. (2011). Teach for America “research” questioned. The Answer Sheet, Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answersheet/post/teach-for-america-research-questioned/2011/12/12/gIQANb40rO_blog.html Krenz, C., & Sax, G. (1986, September/October). What quantitative research is and why it doesn’t work. American Behavioral Scientist, 30(1), 58–69. Kvale, S. (2008, May). Qualitative inquiry between scientific evidendialism, ethical subjectivism, and the free market. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(1). Laczko-Kerr, I., & Berliner, D. (2002). The effectiveness of teach for America and other under-certified teachers on student academic achievement: A case of harmful public policy. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(37), 1–53. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York, NY: Routledge. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. New York: State University of New York Press. Lather, P. (2009). Engaging science policy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Luke, A. (2011, November). Generalizing across borders: Policy and the limits of educational science. Educational Researcher, 40(8), 367–377. Nichols, L., & Berliner, D. (2007). Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America’s schools. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Niiniluoto, I. (2002). Critical scientific realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

On Considering Quantitative Research    67 Poats, S. (1991).The role of gender in agricultural development. Issues in Agriculture, 3. Washington, DC: Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Psillos, S. (1999). Scientific realism: How science tracks truth. New York, NY: Routledge. RadStats. (n.d.). About Radstats. Retrieved from http://www.radstats.org.uk/about. htm Schreyögg, G. (2005). Knowledge management and narratives: Organizational effectiveness through storytelling. Berlin, Germany: Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH. Simpson, L. (1998). Statistical exclusion and social exclusion: The impact of missing data. Paper presented at the International Statistical Institute, Mexico. Retrieved from http://www.radstats.org.uk/no071/article5.htm Stage, F. (2007). Answering critical questions using quantitative data. In F. Stage (Ed.), Using quantitative data to answer critical questions (pp. 5–16). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. St. John, E. P. (2007). Finding social justice in education policy: Rethinking theory and approaches in policy research. In F. Stage (Ed.), Using quantitative data to answer critical questions (pp. 67–80). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Strauss, S. (2005). The linguistics, neurology, and politics of phonics: Silent “e” speaks out. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Trujillo, K., & Hadfield, O. (1999, June). Tracing the roots of mathematics anxiety through in-depth interviews with preservice elementary teachers. College Student Journal, 33(2). doi:01463934 Vallianatos, E. (2006). This land is their land: How corporate farms threaten the world. Monroe, ME: Common Courage. Vivas, E. (2011, November). Women of corn. Z Magazine, 24(11), 18. Weiner, L., & Compton, M. (Eds.). (2008). The global assault on teaching, teachers, and their unions: Stories for resistance. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Widmer, C., & Chavez, A. (1982, Spring). Math anxiety and elementary school teachers. Education, 102(3), 272–276. Zwerling, P. (2011, November). The CIA returns to campus and resistance begins again. Z Magazine, 24(11), 19–21.

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Chapter 4

Song of Myself Honoring the Individual as Critical Scholarship P. L. Thomas Furman University

Abstract The individual as researcher and as the subject of research as well as the power of personal narrative (including the techniques of personal narrative), memoir, and biography must inform the field of education. To embrace the individual is also an argument against privileging objectivity and the pursuit of objectivity since all human endeavors are necessarily subjective and social. This chapter examines the nature and role of personal narrative and educational biography within the norms of scholarly discourse broadly and critical qualitative research narrowly. The discussion also models the various modes explored in the chapter to highlight that these arguments remain a question of power.

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 69–83 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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70    P. L. THOMAS Out of deference, defiance, the choice Closing on a promise, after, after all I’ve done today I have earned my voice —“It Happened Today,” Collapse Into Now, R.E.M.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. —“Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman

In my ethnography research course during my doctoral program in curriculum and instruction, I experienced my first critical transition away from traditional norms concerning research as well as scholarly/academic writing when my professor confronted me about the difference between my personal journal entries and the first draft of my formal essay. My professor had been responding well and even enthusiastically to my journals throughout the course, but when I submitted the first draft of the formal essay, he asked, in a fairly abrupt tone, “Where are you?” I was both disoriented and completely lost at first about his response— because I was trapped in norms for academic writing that I had never confronted. Although I was in my mid-30s and had been a successful student and teacher for many years, I was critical only at the intuitive level. I, in fact, discovered both (critical) constructivism and critical pedagogy as scholarly perspectives while in my doctoral program. That scholarly journey continued for the next 5 or 6 years when I felt myself welcomed into the world of critical pedagogy by Joe Kincheloe, who breathed life into theory and voice into praxis by offering me a contract for a scholarly book in a critical series. Part of my naïve stance included my embodying the “Don’t use ‘I’” mandate for academic writing asserted in most formal schooling. Today, I am a practitioner and advocate of both critical pedagogy and narrative-based scholarship, but my doctoral training did not end with coming to terms with my own “song of myself” as researcher, teacher, and scholar. I also became an educational biographer. Walt Whitman, in his words and the poetic form he embodied (free verse), confronted, challenged, and worked within to expand the poetic norms that silenced. This working within to expand is central to the work of critical educators, scholars, and researchers as we confront research paradigms. Specifically at the K–12 levels controlled by federal and state policies, critical qualitative research often remains positioned outside or beneath traditional research paradigms—and as a result, silenced—but even within the critical qualitative research paradigm, the boundaries must be challenged, deformed, expanded, and reimagined.

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The individual as researcher and as the subject of research as well as the power of personal narrative (including the techniques of personal narrative), memoir, and biography must inform the field of education. To embrace the individual is also an argument against privileging objectivity and the pursuit of objectivity since all human endeavors are necessarily subjective and social. As Anderson (1998) concludes in his musing about moving toward his own experiments as an educational biographer, to erase humans from human endeavors is to erase context of time and place and ultimately to reduce understanding: I find this argument disquieting. The methods and techniques used should be those that help you conduct your study in a way that allows you to gain the understanding you seek. If you want to understand the culture of a school, engage in ethnography. If you want to learn the life history of John Carroll, engage in biography. If you are interested in understanding the use of language in the classroom, engage in socio-linguistic research. If you want to know which approach to reading simultaneously optimizes reading achievement and attitude, engage in experimental psychological research. . . .Why limit yourself to only those phenomena that can be understood through your favorite method and related techniques? Methods and techniques are means to ends; they are not ends in themselves. (pp. 260–261; emphasis added)

Below, then, I examine the role of personal narrative and educational biography both within the norms of scholarship and against those norms. As well, I model a variety of modes within this discussion that also pushes against the normative nature of academia and challenges critical qualitative scholarship as questions of power. The Song of Myself: Personal Narrative as Liberation In a commentary article on the education reform debate occurring under the Obama administration, I opened the piece as follows: For nearly two decades, I taught high school English in rural upstate South Carolina. During about the last half of that part of my career, I also served as the soccer coach—a role that added valuable nuance and perspective to my role as a teacher and mentor to young people. Soccer is a spring sport in South Carolina since high schools tend to use the football fields for soccer. Each spring, one of my greatest headaches as a soccer coach was navigating spring break, which invariably fell near the end of the regular season and disrupted our practice schedule as we headed to the playoffs. Parents and players alike tended to push against my belief that

72    P. L. THOMAS we needed to practice at least some of the week (I wanted all of the week, by the way). One year, after a particularly difficult wrestling match over when and if we’d practice during spring break, I was driving my wife to the Nissan dealership on the Tuesday of spring break and my cell phone rang. The voice on the other end was the captain of the soccer team, to whom I said something like, “Hey, Jason, what’s up?” Within a few seconds, I realized that my entire soccer team was waiting for me at the field for the practice I had fought for and then completely forgotten to attend. The next morning at the next scheduled practice time, I was there early and I set out to run 10 laps around the soccer field—double the required five laps for players who missed practices. As my players arrived, one by one, they joined me on the laps. I never said a word about my laps, although I apologized for missing the practice the day before, but my players knew what I was doing—and most, I think, realized that I had chosen to run more laps than I required for them. This story is not self-aggrandizement. I have failed far too often in my life as a teacher, coach, parent, and husband—and this space doesn’t afford me the space needed to catalog those failures. This story is to state that, despite my many failures, I believed in and practiced one Golden Rule of teaching, coaching, and mentoring young people: Hold yourself to higher standards than you ask of those over whom you are granted authority. (Thomas, 2011a)

While this is a commentary for the general public, the opening is essentially the same blend of style I use for much of my scholarly work—modes that explore and challenge traits of expressive writing as well as the norms of academic discourse. In a scholarly article on poverty for Souls journal, for example, I introduced the reader to my early journey into race: Born into a working-middle-class white home, I entered public schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s when desegregation wedged its way into schools in upstate South Carolina—even though it had been the law for more than a decade. I attended school and played sports with African American friends, classmates, and teammates for twelve years, but the language of race among my childhood friends (when we were not segregating ourselves by race) and the language of white homes revealed that both racial unrest and racism were alive and well in the South. Even more damning was that very little was being done anywhere, especially in schools, about that racism, about those cultural assumptions. Poet Adrienne Rich has claimed that what is “rendered unspeakable, [is] thus unthinkable.” And throughout my childhood we lived lives that we did not speak

Song of Myself    73 about frankly, as if the weight of our prejudices were not burdens everyone could see. In my sophomore year of high school, I was the only white player on the junior varsity basketball team, an ironic and early lesson in minority status that would not entirely affect who I was for a few more years when I began— during my college experience—to face my enculturation in the racist South. Below the surface of my rising awareness about racism lay the impact of affluence and poverty as well. But being a critical educator in the same high school I attended, teaching many children of poverty and a dwindling racially diverse student body (percentages of African Americans decreased steadily in my home town from my childhood and throughout my eighteen years teaching in the high school), was my true lesson in the inherent failure of utopian expectations and crisis rhetoric along with accountability measures in our education system, all of which appeared to seek more equitable schools, but in fact worked to maintain a status quo that honored middle-class assumptions about humans, intelligence, and success. In the mid-1990s, while I was in my doctoral program, I also learned that a significant chasm existed between the academic and scholarly world of higher education and the so-called practical world of K–12 education, where teachers and students suffered reductive practices—workshops and workbooks—that claimed to address complex situations such as poverty. The reality, however, is that education is about conforming children to the social norms—not the revolution that I had envisioned when I felt the call to be a teacher. (Thomas, 2010, p. 263)

While the two openings above have different audiences and purposes— one public and one scholarly—they share techniques, personal narrative (Nash, 2004), and conversational style, and they often receive similar reactions despite the different audiences: my techniques are challenged or editors and reviewers assume some failure or inexperience on my part. In fact, many of my pieces are accepted with caveats and requests that I eliminate the opening narrative. Personal narrative as a technique—when framed against traditional views of objectivity, validity, reliability, and generalizability—remains on the edges of what both the public and academics expect and honor, either within a traditional academic discourse or as a genre of scholarship itself. Nash (2004) offers one argument for moving beyond traditional paradigms: I hope to make the case that SPN research is important in its own right, according to its own lights. SPN scholarship is controversial, at least in part, because it dares to redefine the idea of “rigor” to fit its own set of truth criteria. Some examples of these criteria are trustworthiness, honesty, plausibility, situatedness, interpretive self-consciousness, introspectiveness/self-reflection, and universal-

74    P. L. THOMAS izability. Jerome Bruner adds the following truth criteria to what he calls “autobiographical narratives”: coherence, livability, and adequacy. (p. 5)

Norms, then, help mask careless conflating of concepts, such as “objectivity” with “rigor” or “quantitative” with “valid.” Personal narrative, memoir, biography, and other forms of research and academic discourse driven by rich language (instead of statistical and numerical renderings of the examined world) speak against the silencing of the individual within traditional paradigms. A decade after the implementation of NCLB, the wider world of education and the more specific arena of scholarship and research (and even more narrowly, educational research) have been stalled and regressed in terms of the nuance experienced through the rise of postmodernism, post-postmodernism, critical pedagogy, feminism, ethic studies, and gender/sexuality studies. The importance of individual voice did gain ground throughout the mid-20th century. Yet NCLB codifying what counts as research and public discourse marginalizing science, research, public education, and teachers (Thomas, 2011b) have dealt a harsh blow to calls for expanding our view of what counts as research and how we address validity and reliability. But narrative-based research and scholarly discourse offer an expansion of research paradigms that brings that research closer to the nuance and chaos that characterizes human existence and human understanding. In the second decade of the 21st century, in fact, I believe critical qualitative research must be driven by this expansion and reconsideration of research paradigms, along with establishing research, scholarly expression, and ways of knowing as perpetually in a state of flux. Normalizing and narrowing expectations and research to traditional paradigms or within critical paradigms allowing “critical” to become normalizing itself is reducing knowing to known, thus silencing the critical “I” and turning the organic nature of knowing into the crumbling statue in the desert examined by Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” To embrace narrative, for example, is to challenge the distorting mask of objectivity and the corrosive and careless scar of mere bias. Instead, we ask for defining characteristics that increase research complexity along with the credibility of teachers and researchers as individuals. For example, as a teacher who conducts careful research, my role moves from measuring the impact of poverty on educational outcomes in order to present that data to fellow scholars, students, and the public (through discourse that refrains from using “I” and seeks to scrub the researcher from the researched) to telling the stories of the impact of poverty on people seeking education, stories that are individualized but representative of the patterns I have uncovered through my scholarship. These stories are both the stories I have examined and my stories, told not through a staged objective pose, but as

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a transparent argument for praxis—for my agency, for the agency of those living in poverty, and for the empowerment of every individual in a free society despite her or his station in life. What, then, defines the pursuit of credible scholarship? In part, personal narrative, for example, confronts both our assumptions about composing, discourse, and research. At least part of the motivation for seeking narrow paradigms of research and writing about that research, I believe, is driven by a faith in credibility and what we generally call rigor. This suggests that some standards must be agreed upon among those doing the research and those receiving the research; or we are left with careless research and academic writing that is no more credible than work done by laypersons— those without expertise. Based in part on Nash (2004) and his guidelines for pursuing scholarly personal narrative, I consider the qualities found in personal narrative as purposeful as traditional expectations of research and academic writing; but more authentic since narrative allows the researcher as writer to expand the richness of evidence, to expose the questions as well as the possible solutions, to match the messy nature of human existence to the research itself. In other words, to expand how we express research does not mean we have no concern for quality; it means that we allow the arguments to expand, including raising and pursuing challenges to traditional paradigms such as the following: • Writing about research must open with a clear focus, but how that is achieved can and should move beyond stilted “The following paragraphs will . . .” as well as considering the value in creating a focus that rises above the direct thesis statement. The field of composition has struggled against the template approach to writing driven by the 5-paragraph essay and its cousins; the tension between templates for expression often found in academia (and rarely anywhere else), and authentic awareness of the many and diverse paths to expression is a valuable argument needed in research. No one is suggesting that texts about research should have no focus, but research that honors the individual expands the relationship between research and writing about research as well as the relationship among researcher, the researched, and the audience. • To honor the individual against the norm of generalization is to consider the role of the researcher in offering representative narratives (both of outliers and the generalizable) that create a rich understanding of evidence. A call for acknowledging and expressing the individual is not a cavalier discounting of the problems with outliers or the caution about cherry-picking examples.

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• Narrative and personal narrative in scholarly work contribute to the “I” as expert as an alternative to the misguided claims of objectivity. Once the researcher/scholar makes the Self transparent, through the use of “I” and personal narrative, the researcher/scholar makes claims of expertise driving decisions, stances, and claims that are more valid and substantial than claims made by someone not expert, someone who hasn’t taken the care and time to study evidence and draw conclusions. • Traditional paradigms for scholarly writing reject or at least discourage figurative or poetic language—such as the rich metaphors and rhetorical techniques in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”—including cautions about poetic language in APA guidelines. But personal narrative and the use of figurative language and rich rhetorical techniques acknowledge the importance of engaging text as well as the importance of precise language. As I noted above, the expertise of the scholar is both reflected in and challenged by the apt use of figurative language. To generate figurative language that presents a scholarly argument well is a skill we should honor, just as we honor careful calculations of quantitative data. • The pursuit of objectivity is a direct and indirect rejection of passion and a masking of voice (of course, the detached norm of traditional scholarship is a type of voice, but normalizing it allows that fact to be ignored). A passion that leads to careless bias is different than a passion and voice for accuracy. The passionate scholar makes a transparent case for an argument that is based on evidence and the careful teasing through of that evidence. • Personal narrative and a scholarly voice embrace questions above drawing conclusions, but the raising of questions and the consideration of tentative conclusions do not discount the potential value of quantitative data and solid conclusions. Traditional norms of objectivity, quantitative data, and valid and reliable claims tend to marginalize other ways of knowing the world, which is embraced by narrative and scholarly voice. • Personal narrative and raising the stylistic expectations for scholarly writing confront the false dichotomy between art and science, ignoring that expertise, craft, and precision are essential for both at the highest and most valuable levels. • A central characteristic of scholarly writing—citation formats—is essential, but many scholars concerned about style and presenting the reader with engaging text find citation mechanics cumbersome. Certainly biography values narrative and readability in a way not valued in traditional academic writing; as well, that emphasis in biography highlights the need to balance robust citations and readability,

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particularly as that supports the expansion of narrative and personal narrative in scholarly writing. For example, in a 2011 biography of Malcolm X (Marable, 2011), I was struck by the choice Marable made concerning citations. In this work, readers experience a great deal of quoting weaved into his captivating and provocative retelling of Malcolm X’s life, but there are no direct citations in the text. Instead, each quote is cited in the appendix of the book; the reader must look for the page number and part of the quote in order to trace the evidence to the source. While I believe in and often advocate for the use of personal narrative both as a technique within educational research and as a powerful form of educational research, I also recognize the need to explore and honor a wide range of research techniques and genres that focus in varying ways on the individual—again to increase the diversity and complexity of critical qualitative research but not to honor one form of research or discourse above others. Next, I turn to education biography as an example of one field of study and expression that can and should be expanded in our search for truth and understanding. ”The Universal in a Single Human Life”: Educational Biography as Critical Expansion My work in my doctoral program was guided by Craig Kridel, who was about to publish his seminal work advocating the value of educational biography (Kridel, 1998). There, Kridel considered the role of educational biography within the context of other forms of qualitative research and discourse: Ours is a postmodern age where educators clearly recognize the importance of personal narrative, the power of stories, and the significance of whose perspective is being expressed and whose is being heard. Authoritative knowledge becomes antiquated with the emergence of multifaceted research methodologies embodying interpretive, naturalistic inquiry. . . . Yet, as the field of education further explores various forms of qualitative research—ethnographies, case studies, life histories, interpretive practice, participative inquiry, narratives and “narrative reasoning,” and teachers’ stories—biographical work clearly has much to offer as researchers feel their way along and seek to shed light on this complex phenomenon we call education. (pp. 10–11)

My dissertation was a biography of English educator Lou LaBrant (Thomas, 2001), and I soon adopted the use of memoirs and biographies in my own work as a teacher of writing. But central to my scholarly work and my teaching was embracing the importance of nuance among qualitative

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paradigms. Louise DeSalvo’s (1996) Vertigo became a foundational sample of my arguments for craft in writing and for the importance of individual lives and voices in coming to know and understand the world as well as the field of education. But the DeSalvo of memoir was not entirely the DeSalvo of biography, such as her work on Virginia Woolf. While memoir and personal narrative allow a researcher to share his or her perceptions of self in the context of his or her own life, biography adds the dimension of researcher and subject. As DeSalvo (1998) explains, I, for one, read biography not to find out all the facts about that person’s life. . . . I wanted to know what the biographer makes of the subject’s life. . . . That is to say, I am interested in the biographer’s interpretation of the meaning of a person’s life. . . . This is why I write people’s lives: to illuminate the process by which creative people make their lives worthwhile through their work. (p. 270)

My work, then, as a biographer of LaBrant, was not merely to detail her entire life. In fact, the evidence of her full life was far too sparse to undertake that goal. I sought to “illuminate” the life of LaBrant as teacher and scholar, as well as LaBrant the woman, excelling as she did from the late 19th century until 1991. Ten years after Kridel (1998) examined the potential for biography in educational research and well into the NCLB era, educational biography appears stalled, however, “If the literary form is so popular, then why is not biographical research more accepted in the field of educational research?” (Kridel, 2008, p. 6). Educational biography has suffered the same fate of all paradigms outside the traditional/progressive ideology and the narrow experimental paradigms of research currently reinforced through bureaucratic approaches to education. During the Obama administration, the rise in bureaucratic and corporate reform policies has further eroded the significance of critical qualitative research, and within qualitative research, Kridel (2008) believes that educational biography has stagnated or even lost ground due to “insufficient attention to method among educational biographers” (p. 7). Both as an essential element in pushing against corporate education reform and in order to achieve the promise offered by educational biography, I examine here the attention to method that Kridel has offered: “I wish to propose a framework for educational biography that may in some way allow all to reconsider their scholarship and that of others and to encourage a discussion of research focus, purposes, and directions” (p. 8). As I noted above about the work of DeSalvo, educational biography is distinct as a research paradigm and mode of research discourse, although it shares some of the craft of personal narrative and memoir. Particularly

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in the current education reform movement, which misrepresents research and marginalizes educators as well as educational researchers (much of the reform movement is driven by leaders in fields outside of education and even academia), examining the nuance and value offered by educational biography invites in a wider range of voices and perspectives as we seek to reform education, a field that is far more complex and unwieldy than we tend to acknowledge in public discourse. The first in the “five large realms in . . . educational biography” identified by Kridel (2008) is “’scholarly chronicles’ with its focus on the documentary, historical portrayal of an individual” (p. 8; emphasis in original). This, I feel, is the central contribution that educational biography can make to education research and reform broadly, and to critical qualitative research more narrowly—the historical perspective needed to assess the misguided and distorted calls for reform facing education at the beginning of the 21st century. In my ELA methods course and in most of my graduate classes, I share this passage with my students: “We have some hundreds of studies now which demonstrate that there is little correlation (whatever that may cover) between exercises in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the principles illustrated in independent writing” (LaBrant, 1946, p. 127). LaBrant’s scholarship and publications, along with her practice as a teacher of English, detail the patterns of misinformation that have plagued education and research-based education reform for decades. For example, LaBrant (1947) lamented the “considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87). Educational biographies, then, offer individual perspectives and lives in the context of history, working against the traditional norm of decontextualizing data from both the personal and the historical. Next, Kridel (2008) identifies the “intellectual biography with its focus on motive, critique, and a conceptual analysis of the subject’s significance in the world of ideas” (p. 8; emphasis in original). Biography allows educational researchers to focus on ideas as an integral part of the landscape upon which education occurs. As I noted earlier, the life I uncovered concerning LaBrant was primarily tied to her scholarship, her publications. Thus, my biography of LaBrant is her life of ideas as it reflected and shaped the history of education over nearly seven decades as an educator and scholar. While LaBrant’s ideas may or may not be universal, they provide a context against which to understand the history of English teaching and a context against which to examine the current field of literacy/English teaching. LaBrant’s life, then, when examined, exposes an educator who both embodied and directly identified herself as a progressive in the Deweyan tradition (Thomas, 2001). The biographical exploration of LaBrant as progressive creates a lived and nuanced consideration of the concept “progres-

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sive” and thus a reconsideration of how we characterize and even judge the Deweyan influence on progressivism and U.S. education. LaBrant’s life is at least one compelling set of artifacts that refutes the popular perception that education has been progressive and a failure, leading to the charge that progressivism has caused the failure of those schools (see Kohn, 2008, for a detailed examination of progressivism not being common in education). As I faced writing the biography of LaBrant, I had to consider how to narrow my focus as DeSalvo (1998) suggests. Both her life as a woman and as an educator informed that narrowing. As Kridel (2008) explains in his third realm, life history writing (and the narrative study of lives) with its allegiance to social science research traditions. This has taken many forms, perhaps resonating most in the area of teacher education with the burgeoning “first year teacher” research and the “study of teachers lives” scholarship. (p. 8; emphasis in original)

Educational biography, then, includes exploring the complex life of teachers—not to identify and prescribe the life that teachers should seek, but to describe the complex and full life that being a teacher entails. Again, the current discourse about education reform marginalizes and misrepresents teachers, and teacher stories are ideal avenues to informing the public better about what being a teacher means, especially as the teaching profession is distinct from other professions. (Both first-person personal narratives/ memoirs and biographies of teachers’ lives help those outside of education appreciate that teaching is a full part of any person’s life and that teaching is far more complex and unpredictable than most people realize.) Within LaBrant’s story, we find in her own unpublished memoir a teacher story of her work in Chicago in the early 1930s while pursuing her doctorate. LaBrant was teaching in a highly scripted setting with school mandates about textbooks and periodic testing that was used to evaluate teachers (Thomas, 2001). These stories of her life as a teacher give us context, but they also can provide a foundation for exploring other teacher stories—those told about teachers and those told by teachers. As LaBrant’s teacher stories reveal, part of the historical reality of being a teacher has been navigating the misguided mandates that work against best practice and teacher autonomy (Thomas, 2011d). In the fourth realm from Kridel (2008), he speaks to a key distinguishing element in educational biography—the role and voice of the biographer: “memoir biography” (still distinct from autobiography) with attention to the researcher in relation to the biographical subject. A life story is being told but in relation to the transactional experiences of the biographer which, in

Song of Myself    81 turn, influences and foreshadows similar experiences of the reader. (pp. 8–9; emphasis in original)

This is significant to me because, through me and my scholarship, the biography of LaBrant remains unfinished and always in process. My work is informed by her life: my scholarship often includes citations to her work, and embedded in my work are biographical vignettes and my own memoir writing illuminating a complex interplay of my life/scholarship, LaBrant’s life/scholarship, and the organic narrative sprouting up around both as part of the larger scholarly discourse about education and literacy. The final realm identified by Kridel (2008) confronts a key aspect (factual accuracy) of several genres, including biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative: The fifth type, narrative biography, represents a “dynamic” portrayal of a life without the need for “absolute facticity” or a comprehensive account from birth to grave. Neither is this style burdened by a definitive interpretation of the subject that must be accepted by all. Facts do exist and some interpretations are more thoughtful than others, but the biographer, while consciously aware of his or her personal emotions and reactions to the subject, recognizes that the telling of the story is primarily defined by the subject in relation to readers. Too often the reader is forgotten in much of our “myspace research”; narrative educational biography insists that the significance of the biographical subject is constructed in relation to the anticipated needs and interests of the reader. (p. 9; emphasis in original)

One regret I hold about my work with LaBrant’s life is that I did not pursue the re-creation of her daily life, although through my work and my interviews with people close to her, I do know that such stories could be crafted if I were to set aside my need to be exact about facts. As Kridel (2008) notes concerning the James Frey/Oprah issue over the nature of memoir, interpretation and re-creation as central to biography are valuable tensions that add to the nuance and value of research outside the narrow constraints of experimental/quasi-experimental paradigms that take objective poses and claim to stand above interpretation and re-creation (thus obscuring, misleading, and silencing those tensions). Educational biography that re-creates the full life of an educator presents us with the tensions that make learning and coming to know dynamic instead of static (a result of quantitative and conclusive research).

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A Question of Power In You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn (1994) models through memoir and confronts the essential problem posed by privileging objectivity and, concurrently, narrow views of research: When I became a teacher I could not possibly keep out of the classroom my own experiences. . . . Does not the very fact of that concealment teach something terrible—that you can separate the study of literature, history, philosophy, politics, the arts, from your own life, your deepest convictions about right and wrong? . . . In my teaching I never concealed my political views. . . . I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or the Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth. . . . From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. (pp. 7, 173, emphasis in original)

The rise of corporate approaches to education reform throughout the first decade of the 21st century have intensified traditional commitments in education and society to positivistic and behavioral paradigms that silence and marginalize critical perspectives. Educating people as a central component of maintaining and expanding a free society is necessarily complex, organic, and unpredictable; thus, research paradigms that are narrow (experimental/quasi-experimental) fail to meet the challenges of reforming universal public education. Better suited to our pursuits are critical qualitative paradigms, including personal narrative and educational biography, as I have detailed above, and as Kridel (2008) argues: This is when educational biography transcends the boundaries of qualitative research and brings together the disparate communities in education so that we may consider the universal in a single human life. This is when the sweeping gestures of the biographer, the force of narrative, method, and compositional form enter the field of education with great promise and power. (p. 14)

Educational research, then, is a “question of power” (Thomas, 2011c); personal narrative and educational biography can offer avenues to expanding that challenge against the traditional forces that have allowed power to migrate to a select few at the expense of everyone else’s empowerment.

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References Anderson, L. (1998). Inquiry, data and understanding: A search for meaning in educational research. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Writing educational biography: Explorations in qualitative research (pp. 255–264). New York, NY: Garland. DeSalvo, L. (1996). Vertigo: A memoir. New York, NY: Dutton. DeSalvo, L. (1998). Advice to aspiring educational biographers. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Writing educational biography: Explorations in qualitative research (pp. 269–271). New York, NY: Garland. Kohn, A. (2008, Spring) Progressive education: Why it’s hard to beat, but also hard to find. Independent School. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/progressive.htm Kridel, C. (1998). Introduction. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Writing educational biography: Explorations in qualitative research (pp. 3–12). New York, NY: Garland. Kridel, C. (2008). Biographical meanderings: Reflections and reminiscences on writing educational biography. Vitae Scholasticae, 25, 5–16. LaBrant, L. (1946, March). Teaching high-school students to write. English Journal, 35(3), 123–128. LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86–94. Marable, M. (2011). Malcolm X: A life of reinvention. New York, NY: Viking Adult. Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Thomas, P. L. (2001). Lou LaBrant: A woman’s life, a teacher’s life. Huntington, NY: Nova Science. Thomas, P. L. (2010). The Payne of addressing race and poverty in public education: Utopian accountability and deficit assumptions of middle class America. Souls, 12(3), 262–283. Thomas, P. L. (2011a, April 11). Accountability? Start at the top. OpEdNews. Retrieved from http://www.opednews.com/articles/Accountability-Start-at-t-byPaul-Thomas-110411-375.html Thomas, P. L. (2011b, January 26). Belief culture: “We don’t need no education.” truthout. Retrieved from http://archive.truthout.org/belief-culture-we-dontneed-no-education67154 Thomas, P. L. (2011c, March 13). “A question of power”: Of accountability and teaching by numbers. OpEdNews. Retrieved from http://www.opednews. com/articles/A-Question-of-Power—Of-by-Paul-Thomas-110311-481.html Thomas, P. L. (2011d). “A respect for the past, a knowledge of the present, and a concern for the future”: The role of history in English education. English Education, 43(2), 123–144. Zinn, H. (1994). You can’t be neutral on a moving train: A personal history of our times. Boston, MA: Beacon.

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Chapter 5

Letters as Windows Into a Life of Praxis Using the Epistolary Genre to Explore the Tensions Between the Private Self and Public Action Robert Lake Georgia Southern University

Abstract Academic writing is often characterized by impersonal abstraction. This has often been the case with the standard concept of a festschrift or other forms of homage to a particular scholar’s work. This chapter explores the use of the power of epistolary genre to give salience to personal stories, appreciative reflections, and dialogue through a case study that emerged out of a bricological collection of over 80 letters written to Maxine Greene. As Sonia Nieto clearly describes, “The power of the epistolary genre resides in precisely this: it makes a private act public and it gives others access to insights and wisdom that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. In the process, it allows readers to see the interactions between two people who have a personal connection, one of whom has agreed to let others listen in on the conversation”(as cited

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 85–101 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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86   R. LAKE in Lake, 2010, p. x1). In this chapter, I make use of these letter conversations to focus on what these personal connections express about Maxine Greene’s lived experience as situated and embodied philosophy. The role of the public intellectual requires a consciousness of how one conducts their life and beliefs. There will always be tensions between the way we see and know ourselves with the way that others critically or at times adoringly see us, but through the eyes, ears, and mouths of the many that encounter us, our existential selves become a part of lived history. This case study confirms that in the case of Maxine Greene, her public life and her teaching and scholarship are all holistically united at the core.

Dear Critical Qualitative Research Family, I have been asked by the editors of this book to share with our readers what I have learned by using the epistolary genre in critical qualitative research, so I am actually using the letter genre as a way to make salient the value of epistolary inquiry itself. As you know, letter writing is as old as written communication and certainly predates the styles of writing that have characterized the field of educational inquiry, a discipline that is still strongly influenced by 19th century forms of static writing. This has often been the case with the standard concept of a festschrift or other forms of homage to a particular scholar’s work. The project I am writing to you about has many of the same goals as a festschrift, but the genre of writing is quite different because my primary sources are not essays but letters. In this inquiry, I cite personal stories, appreciative reflections, and personal narrative from a collection of over 70 letters written to the educational philosopher Maxine Greene.1 Through the windows provided by these letters, I explore the dialectic between her private life and public acts or praxis. For Freire (1971), praxis is “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (p. 79). Freire goes on to say, “when a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word becomes idle chatter” (p. 87). At the same time, he says that “if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted to activism. The latter—action for action’s sake—negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible” (p. 88). The role of the public intellectual requires a consciousness of how one conducts one’s life and beliefs in terms of Freire’s definition of praxis. Tensions between the way we see and know ourselves with the way that others critically, or at times adoringly, see us are inevitable, but it is only through the eyes, ears, and mouths of the many who encounter us that our lives become a part of our shared understanding and culture. What I discovered as I read these wonderfully personal and scholarly letters is that Maxine Greene‘s public life, teaching, and scholarship are all deeply connected through a habitual lifestyle of contemplative reflection and action.

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I have become increasingly aware of the value of context when it comes to understanding what needs to be dismantled and created anew. We are still strongly dominated by methodologies that treat personal voice as an obstacle to “validity” and “objectivity.” Laurel Richardson (2003) argues that we need to break away from forms of static writing that are still too closely aligned to positivistic methods. This static model ignores the role of writing as a dynamic, creative process; it undermines the confidence of beginning qualitative researchers because their experience of research is inconsistent with the writing model; and it contributes to the flotilla of qualitative writing that is simply not interesting to read because adherence to that research is limited because writers are expected to silence their own voices and to view themselves as contaminants. (p. 501)

She goes on further to add that the “writing up” of educational research “validates a mechanistic model of writing, shutting down the creativity and sensibilities of the individual writer/researcher” (p. 502). This crisis of representation has created the need for “new participatory, feminist, and democratic values of interpretive qualitative research [that] mandate a stance that is democratic, reciprocal, and reciprocating rather than objective and objectifying” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 1118). One form of reciprocating discourse is found in the epistolary genre. Letters are written with a recipient in mind and therefore create the context for shared epistemologies and relational aspects of understanding. Moffett’s (1968) concept of the discourse of conversation supports this notion. “Catechisms and imperatives, along with retorts, make the existential, rhetorical, and behavioural features of I-you most keenly felt” (p. 41). Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of the dialogical nature of utterance is appropriate to this genre as well. The utterance is filled with  dialogic overtones, and they must be taken into account in order to fully understand the style of the utterance. After all, our thought itself—philosophical, scientific, artistic—is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well. (p. 92, emphasis in original)

Even though I have never seen Bakhtin cited in Freire’s work, it is easy to see that their ideas about dialogue and the co-construction of knowledge are strikingly similar in some ways. Paulo Freire was on a continual quest to humanize the field of education. One of the ways he sought to accomplish this was through the use of dialogue and the epistolary genre in writing. For example, he wrote three books in a dialogue format (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Horton & Freire, 1990; Shor & Freire, 1987) and four books of letters (Freire, 1978, 1996, 1998, 2004). In fact, my ideas for beginning this inquiry

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build directly on Sonia Nieto’s (2008) book, Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare to Teach. In the next section of this letter, my aim is to illustrate the power of the epistolary genre for facilitating a dialogical knowing between the letter writer and the recipient. I do this by taking a stance of qualitative researcher as a bricoleur and employing a similar construct borrowed from the field of cinematography: montage. In the introduction to The Landscape of Qualitative Research (2003), Denzin and Lincoln, two of the most notable voices in qualitative research, share the metaphor of the qualitative researcher “as bricoleur or maker of quilts [that] uses aesthetic and material tools of his or her craft” (p. 6). This metaphor extends beyond the pragmatic to the “aesthetics of representation” into the concept of montage. This term is used in cinematography to describe the process of fusing together pieces of film to form a newly created composite from footage shot in real time. The fusing together is often done in juxtaposition to create greater depth and breadth to the representation of images. I am writing this letter as a bricoleur to create a montage from the shared history of the writers and the life, work, and scholarship of Maxine Greene. From this point on, I will cite directly from the letters. By presenting them in block quotations, the polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1986) and conversational tone is preserved and fused together with my own reflective writing to all of you. Windows Into Public Largeness of Heart and Private Anxiety The following excerpts from three letters provide us with a clear view of Greene’s praxis of “see[ing] things big” (Greene, 1995, p. 10) and acting accordingly, and her habit of continual self-questioning, even to the point of anxiety at times. The setting of this first story is a luncheon with Maxine, Suzanne de Castell, and “her new partner Mary B.” Astonished, because after all, Maxine was so “Big,” everyone wanted a bit of you, and yet every time we met, you always found a way to have a lunch or dinner together. I introduced you to my new partner Mary B, who was understandably star-struck and nervous. No sooner had we poured very large glasses of red wine and started to eat, Mary reached out and caught the edge of one full glass with her shirtcuff, and over it tipped, spilling quantities of red wine over the crisp white table linen. Before any breath could be caught, you launched into the most irrefutable account of how your carelessness had caused the spill and how sorry you were, as we all mopped up, and Mary and I exchanged glances silently assenting to this generous fabrication, sharing astonishment at the incredibly deep well of generosity out of which this one small-BIG kindness had been drawn. (de Castell, 2010)

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The second story is from Eugene Provenzo. His letter is a case study in what he calls “academic courage and grace” (2010, p. 108). My observation from this vignette is that Maxine does not just give lip service to speaking up for those with less privilege. Her praxis clearly shines in this account. I had been a professor at the University of Miami since 1976. I was very young, barely thirty years old. My wife, Asterie, and I were presenting papers at a conference on Urban Education at Teachers College sponsored by the Olin Foundation. You were one of two critics assigned to responding to our paper. The second critic was a distinguished higher education professor—now long retired—whose name, as a matter of discretion, I will not mention . . . Asterie and I knew almost no one at the conference. We had prepared innovative articles on the history of children’s museums and the child labor photos of Lewis Hine. This was a decade before PowerPoint was introduced. We had carousels of approximately eighty slides for each presentation. The materials were put together with a great deal of care. The photographs we drew on for our papers were stunning historical artifacts . . . The unnamed critic who preceded you got up and started making a series of vague and essentially unkind comments about the papers. He was playing the role of an academic bully and authority figure. He basically said we had done a lot of fancy technological footwork, but questioned what there was of substance in our work. One needs to remember that this was long before visual sources or “Popular Culture” were paid much attention to in academic circles. After awhile, it became clear that our critic had not only not read the papers which he had received weeks before, but had barely listened to our presentations. As he rambled on I could feel my wife tense up next to me. As relatively new researchers in the field we had worked hard to make our presentations something special, and here was a senior scholar dismissing us for being “too slick.” We were devastated, and a little too young to realize that the distinguished commentator on work [sic] was being an irresponsible blowhard. We waited nervously as you made your way slowly and gracefully up to the podium to do your critique of our work. You took a moment to begin—hesitating at first as you lit a cigarette from which you took an enormous drag. Then, holding the cigarette with your hand to the side (a gesture I would describe as a “Greenian” rhetorical flourish combined with the pose of an elegant fashion model in Vogue), you scanned the audience like a hawk eying its prey. Finally you fixed your stare on the first critic and said something to the effect that: “I think these young people did a wonderful presentation and that their research is important and Professor _____________ missed something special by not having read or listened to their work.” I can’t remember what else you said—that was enough. A hush spread across the entire audience of nearly 200 people that I will never forget. You finished

90   R. LAKE by asking the audience to “give us a hand,” and then you led the audience in a quiet round of applause (Provenzo, 2010, p. 108).

This habit of large-hearted sight and action has a price. The very sensitivities that enable us to see others beyond abstraction are often the cause of our own sense of uncertainty and anxiety. In the section below, you will get a glimpse of the union of private praxis and public vulnerability in a way that will encourage those of us who still experience anxiety in our public presentations. Even now, after all these years of rightfully being acknowledged as one of the most influential scholars in our field, Maxine Greene continues to ask, “that crazy question” (Nieto, 2010, p. xi), which is, “was that alright?” At a conference in 2009 in New York City, I had the privilege of making sure that all of the logistics of time and place and sound equipment were in order so Greene could deliver the keynote address at the International Linguistics Association Annual Meeting. After she finished her stunningly appropriate remarks, she asked me, “Was that all right?” The following section of a letter to Maxine from William Pinar (2010) directly addresses this tension between Greene’s self-perception and her public persona, especially the last few lines. There was always drama associated with your public appearances. Most of all, there was the public excitement generated by the audience at the prospect of hearing you, but also (as I learned when introducing you to the 1973 University of Rochester Curriculum Theory Conference) there was the private anxiety that you said you felt before commencing each public address. As I noticed your trembling hands grasping the lectern, I accepted this as a sign of your humility. Was that anxiety, confided in private before the public, also an acknowledgement of the dissonance between these two domains? “Anxiety signals that the threat cannot be exteriorized, objectified,” Joan Copjec (2004, 103) suggests, “that it is instead internal, brought on by an encounter with that limit which prevents one’s coincidence with oneself.” Such anxiety, then, would seem to mark the “creative tensionality” between what is and what is not yet, the very project of education you enacted through print, en personne.

I think you all will agree with me that our moments of anxiety about the public performance of our work may be a solid indication at times that we are in the “in-between,” the very space of praxis. This is different from obsession, which is much more narcissistic than reflection that leads to more engaged action. I hope we never lose that kind of anxiety. And I hope you are beginning to see what I mean about this genre’s distinctive ability to provide personal glimpses of this kind of praxis. This power lies in the fact that the writers are free from the constraints of traditionally abstract and posi-

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tivistic academic genres. Greene herself (1995) says that the tendency to see things small comes “from a detached point of view, to watch behaviors from the perspective of a system, to be concerned with trends and tendencies rather that the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life” (p. 10). A Multidimensional Rendering of Greene’s Life of Praxis In this next section, I share about the surprising power of a polyphonic montage of publically read letters to Maxine Greene and the significance of this to our own work as critical researchers and educators. I shift the setting to a session at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New Orleans. My reason for doing so is that I want to share with all of you the power of the epistolary genre to freshly re-create and bring to life the subject. In this case of course, the subject is the life of Maxine Greene as she is presented through the public reading of eight letters by their authors. This rendering was made all the more salient by the fact that an excerpt from a DVD interview with Maxine was scheduled to be shown during the presentation, but for unexpected logistical reasons it was never delivered to the session. As it turned out, the personal connection between the lives of the readers and Maxine Greene, as well as those in attendance, create a personal, multidimensional connection to Maxine that far surpassed what may have been witnessed in the DVD alone. Picture this: a panel of eight presenters and a chairperson seated at a table in the front of over 200 participants. There was an air of excitement and anticipation in the atmosphere, mostly because people were expecting to see Maxine Greene. I had to tell everyone that she was not able to make it because of her physical frailty, “but there will be a video greeting and response to the letters by Maxine and it should be arriving here any minute” (Lake, 2011). Almost everyone was content to wait for at least a glimpse of her on DVD and a chance to hear her distinct, smoky, staccato voice. We waited for 10 minutes. Panel members began texting the person who promised the video, but alas, there was no response and no video. We decided to start anyway. As editor and chair of the session, I introduced everyone and then explained a little about how this book came about. Here are a few of my remarks. In the summer of 2009, while mowing the lawn, the idea struck to collect a group of thank-you letters to Maxine. A few days later I called Sonia Nieto and shared with her my idea about this book. She gave me the nudge I needed to get started. Next I asked Maxine permission to put the book together, and she said yes, but later confessed to me that she didn’t really think anything would come together. From there, I began to email some of her friends and former

92   R. LAKE students. All of them said something about the honor of being included in this book. I finally had to stop collecting letters when over seventy-four people responded. As the written contributions began to come in, I was amazed by the breadth of diverse reflection on her written work and touched by the many vignettes that were shared, all of which confirm her as someone whose teaching, life experience and scholarship are holistically united at the core. We present these letters as windows into the heart and life of one of our national treasures. (Lake, 2011)

After I finished my introduction, the DVD still had not arrived. I began to call on the contributors. The first was Sonia Nieto. She stood to read her foreword to the book. Here are some excerpts from her letter, which I cite because it elaborates on the power of the epistolary genre to “make a private act public and it gives others access to insights and wisdom that might otherwise be inaccessible to them” (Nieto 2010, p. xi). A number of years ago, I undertook a project to compile and publish a series of letters to Paulo Freire. I had actually been collecting them from my students since 1980, when I started teaching at the University of Massachusetts. We read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1971) as the text for my Introduction to Multicultural Education class. Although Freire never mentioned the words “multicultural education” in his groundbreaking book, I always thought his ideas reflected how I conceived of this field. Because his ideas and writing were challenging to some students, especially undergraduates, I began asking them, toward the end of the semester, to write a letter to him. I wanted them to explain how his ideas had instructed, inspired, angered, or moved them to action, and how their teaching might change as a result. I envisioned this as a good way to have students reflect on Freire’s philosophy, and for me to make sure they were “getting” his ideas. And so emerged my book Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach (Paradigm, 2008), its title fashioned after his book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Westview, 1998). Through the words of teachers, scholars, teacher educators, artists, and even a farmer-educator (a former student of mine), readers of Dear Paulo have participated in a private/public act of love and appreciation for Paulo Freire, a man most of them never met but who has nonetheless taught them many things . . . The power of the epistolary genre resides in precisely this: it makes a private act public and it gives others access to insights and wisdom that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. In the process, it allows readers to see the interactions between two people who have a personal connection, one of whom has agreed to let others listen in on the conversation. While the private letters of many famous people have been published (although they might never have been meant to see the light of day), books such as Dear Paulo and Dear Maxine are different in that they are meant, from the outset, to be public encounters that go beyond the writer and the addressee. These letters are meant

Letters as Windows Into a Life of Praxis    93 to illuminate, teach, inspire, and to help us face life with some new meanings and motivations.

As Sonia finished, I scanned the room in hopes that someone might be bringing us the DVD, but no one came forward with it. Mike Rose was next. Here are some excerpts from the reading of his letter. In this beautifully written piece, he shares that he turns to Greene’s books and to letters he has received from her for inspiration when he is experiencing writer’s block. The poetic quality of her writing has inspired a host of people in this way, including me. Dear Maxine, We met right after the publication of my Possible Lives. That book got us talking, and I would like to take this opportunity now—this letter of tribute and affection—to tell you how much The Dialectic of Freedom meant to me as I tried to bring Possible Lives to an end. . . . This was a warm and compatible vocabulary. I had been writing about the need in our education debates for portraits of good classrooms, for images of what’s possible. I had been writing, too, about teachers being creative within institutional constraints (like your notion of “situated freedom”). I kept writing about seeing things another way, taking another line of sight—and all your wonderful passages on imagination were resonant here. But now it was time to bring all this together, and it felt encouraging, confirming to read you. There’s nothing like finding someone who has already thought things through. A companion. A hand on the shoulder. I keep correspondence from writers in their books. It’s my simple filing system. The Dialectic of Freedom is much scribbled on and beaten up by now, but the spine holds despite the letters wedged in the middle of the pages. The letters are beautiful, a blend of literature and social science and politics—and great generosity of spirit. They contain your concerns about possibility and dignity and justice, and they are rich with detail from both books and your city, with teaching and students, with new projects. You “flunked retirement.” You “remain obsessional about possibility.” Ideas are imbued with feeling. The letters give a script, a voice to this vibrant blend of cognition and affect. When I needed it most, I found in your work ideas with a heartbeat. (Rose, 2010, pp. 1–3)

Try to imagine, if you can, the mixed feelings I have as these magnificent letters are being read aloud from some of the very best writers in our field, and at the same time, as the chair of this panel, I am quite anxious, too, that the people who came to see Maxine will not be disappointed. There was still no DVD. Next came Deb Meier. She used the letter genre to express things to Maxine that she says would be hard to express in a face-to-face meeting. This also is an excerpt.

94   R. LAKE Dear Maxine, We’ve been planning lunch together for too long. It’s time for us to do it. But, face-to-face, it’ll be harder to say some of the things I want to say to you. I’m always in a better position for conversing with others when I know that someone is your admirer. It makes it unnecessary to ask them as many irrelevant questions. It sets a kind of platform upon which we stand together. . . . You reawakened my first passion and study: history. Connecting Jefferson and Dewey was not my first inclination, but I reread “The American Paradox” in Dialectic of Freedom with fascination recently, as I pondered the connection between the “small schools” idea and Jefferson’s distrust of centralized power. America’s early love affairs with both small, self-governing community and individualism help set the stage. I often feel agonizingly stretched between these, and conscious that some concerns require that “small community to stretch rather widely.” In the same book, you deepen my appreciation for the connections between the uses (and even the mere existence) of public space and the personal freedoms we cherish. A free people needs a “public”—even as too many conservatives and liberals today seem to have forgotten this. (Meier, 2010, p. 34)

By this time, I had almost given up on the DVD. Next came one of Maxine’s students, Martha McKenna. If any of you are curious about Maxine Greene’s approach to teaching, this letter brings you right into one of her classes through Martha’s descriptive power. What I find amazing, as detailed in the excerpt below, is that even with over 100 students in her class, Maxine was able to engage each person through the power of critical questioning, an example we take courage from in these days of increased teaching loads and mandated budget cuts. I can recall vividly the day in which a hundred of us entered a large lecture hall for your opening class. Although the room was crowded, you seemed to be speaking to each one of us individually, engaging us in a conversation through the questions you posed. You began the class, as you always did, by reflecting on what you had heard that day on National Public Radio, had read in the New York Times, and had recently seen on Broadway. You awakened us to what was happening in the world around us that related to our work that day in class, connecting our readings with lived experiences. The Arts and American Education was an extraordinary course, introducing us to the public school movement by contrasting the work of educational reformers with that of artists and writers from the Transcendentalist movement through the 20th century. The central text for the course was your work The Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature, in which you contrasted the assurance and hope of school reformers with the darker perceptions of American writers and artists. You interwove education, philosophy and the arts in the text and in our classes, pointing out the often opposing views of the American experience. You recognized

Letters as Windows Into a Life of Praxis    95 the power of the arts to move us to new levels of understanding of ourselves and the world around us. You asked more questions than you provided answers, encouraging us to seek our own truths. You practiced the pedagogy that you wrote about, teaching us how “to take a stranger’s vantage point on everyday reality . . . to look inquiringly and wonderingly on the world in which one lives” (Greene, 1973, p. 267 in McKenna, 2010, pp. 102–103). No longer could we be passive learners, for you challenged us to enter into each learning experience “wide-awake” to the possibility of new understandings of ourselves and our world. You shared with us the responsibility for constructing our learning experiences, whether engaging with you in the classroom or with the writers and artists in the literature and art or history and philosophy texts that you assigned. You taught us how to do philosophy, engaging us in discussions, giving value to our perspectives, questioning our assumptions and challenging our ideas. Throughout the course I observed a master teacher at work, an experience that would transform my life and my teaching. (McKenna, 2010, pp. 102–103)

By the time Martha finished reading her letter, the emotional tone in the room intensified considerably. Martha’s recollections of Maxine’s approach to teaching were retold so intimately, that some of the people in the room began to tear up. At this point, Mike Rose leaned over to me and whispered, “Maxine is being re-created in this room right now.” Then it hit me—the composite rendering of Maxine through the words, gestures and emotions used in writing and reading these letters had created a true-to-life and -action perception of the way those of us who knew her and her work that, in many ways, is much more vivid and thickly described than a video interview could convey! As I looked out over those in attendance, I saw many younger people who were, more than likely, not as familiar with her work, yet they seemed to be hanging on every word as if they were already bereft of another—yes, I will say it—hero, even though she was still very much “wide awake” in her mind at 93, but not able to travel. The next reader was Gloria Ladson-Billings. In her letter, Gloria compared her experiences of racial prejudice in academic circles with Maxine Greene’s negative experience as a Jewish woman, when she applied to a college for a position as a teacher. Maxine’s persistence in the face of struggle was reassuring and inspiring in relation to her own experiences. The authors asked us to write about how our public lives intersect with, influence, and complicate our personal lives. I recall writing a rather angry chapter entitled, “For colored girls who have considered suicide when the academy is not enough.” I used that chapter to express the frustration I felt trying to negotiate the academy as a Black woman. One of the tasks that Ana and Penny set for us was to read and share each other’s chapters. My anger seemed strangely out of place as I read the chapter that traced your journey. It was astounding to learn that you were turned down from positions and told

96   R. LAKE to go home and raise a family. The academy never even considered your brilliance—you were a woman and there was no need for you to think that you could take a “man’s place.” What struck me about your chapter is that there was not an ounce of bitterness in your struggle. Instead, you wrote beautifully about the value of persistence and struggle. These are the two qualities I have finally learned to appreciate and attempted to cultivate in my own life. You took that challenge as a way to build a powerful testimony to your intellect and passion for philosophy and aesthetics. This testimony would distinguish you from a generation of efficiency theorists who could only see education as a utilitarian enterprise designed to slot people into designated places in the society. You, on the other hand, saw education as a form of liberation that could help us break out of narrowly constructed roles of race, class, or gender. (Ladson-Billings, 2010, pp. 121–122)

This is a powerful lesson for all of us who endeavor to work, teach, and write against the grain as critical educators. As Ladson-Billings illustrated, there is a buoyancy of hope to be drawn from Greene, Freire, and many others’ examples that I hope we can receive as we interact with the personal texts of their lives. The next person to stand and speak was Wendy Kohli. I chose the middle of her letter from which to quote because it expresses a point that is germane to this inquiry: Maxine Greene refuses to yield to a static nature of living, being, and writing and still sees herself as “unfinished”; one who is “not yet.” As a close friend of Maxine, one who has known her for over 20 years, Wendy testified that this is certainly true. Your resistance to closure, to completeness, to being “finished,” allowed (and perhaps forced) you to welcome multiplicity, heteroglossia, and becoming. This is poignantly conveyed in the film, when you cross the street from the Guggenheim to your apartment and remind us that “you are . . . not yet.” After more than nine decades, you certainly are not finished. I continue to be moved to reflection, to action, to creativity, to transformation by your presence in my life. If I could have one wish come true, it would be to turn back the clock 20 years so that I could have dozens more baked spaghetti and chicken suppers with you while catching up on gossip or watching Charlie Rose. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generosity, for your prodding, for your support, for your wit, and for your love. (Kohli, 2010, pp. 54–55)

The next reader was Janet Miller. The excerpts from this letter convey a lovely and intimate picture of the two of them in Maxine’s apartment overlooking Central Park. Their discussions may appear on the surface to be meanderings without a point, but as Janet so clearly expressed, she never

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fails to be inspired to choose and to act upon the present circumstances in order to bring positive changes whenever she is around Maxine Greene. I want to tell you just a sliver of what I have learned not only from our letters to one another over the years, but also from the conversations that we’ve shared, most often sitting at your dining room table in your apartment. You always sit facing the wide living room windows that are bordered by several orchid plants that lean into the glass as well as by vases filled with flowers from your latest visitors and well wishers. Always flowers. We both often gaze at the trees that rise above that steady stream of joggers, dog walkers, and museum-bound tourists who parade under your third-floor windows. And I sit to your left, close to the corner of the table, mostly so that we both can hear one another. Sometimes we talk about our audiologist-incommon, and how funny we both are in trying to help one another in larger settings to hear what others are postulating in a lecture, or a discussion in a class. “What did she say?” we often ask each other. And we laugh. I have a number of favorite passages and sentence sections from your published writings. One section in particular I often recite to myself because its cadence and content constantly impel me to choose: It is, you say, our human “. . . incompleteness that summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action . . . putting an explanation into words, fighting a plague, seeking homes for the homeless, restructuring inhumane schools.” I don’t often feel that I can rise to the challenges you have posed to me and to countless others through your teaching, lecturing, writing, and your constant commitment to “doing philosophy” and to becoming “wide-awake.” But you have taught me that I must keep choosing. And that gift that you offer me—and, yes, to the whole worldwide field of education—is the invitation to live my work and my life as a small form of that project called education that you so magnificently have envisioned and continue to live. (Miller, 2010, pp. 158–163)

William Schubert closed the panel discussion. In his reflective testimony, he shared about the consistent personal encouragement he has received from Greene for over 30 years. He also confirmed that, even in her advanced years, “her inestimable influence resists summarization, because it is ongoing” (Schubert, 2010, p. 112). This letter supports the reality that Maxine Greene has developed habits of continual self-reflection in her endeavor to act rather than just talk about change. He ends his letter with a dense and eloquent description of Greene’s life and scholarship. You challenge us to seek landscapes of increased perspective, to see things as they might be otherwise, to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to study and value insights from the arts and literature, to ask questions of worth within a quest for social justice, to strive to create public spaces, to hope

98   R. LAKE amid tragic contexts, to re-imagine the public school and the private vision, to keep existential questions alive, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, to be increasingly wide awake, to expose the colonial and tyrannical, to find faces of meaning in the Other, to embrace the dialectic of freedom, to release the imagination, to see the arts as both political and aesthetic, to awaken to the inhumanity of exclusion, to overcome, to know that we (too) are not yet, to strive to embody, expand, and enact multiple interpretations. What a legacy, what a worthwhile contribution—still evolving, with relentless possibility. (Schubert, 2010, p. 112, emphasis in original)

As the session ended and I began to greet people one by one, the tone was uplifting and very positive. Maxine Greene was present in the retelling of her praxis because, as Tricia Kress astutely observes, “she was there in relationship with the letter writers. And this illustrates so well how this genre can do things that other research genres can’t—it unites the private and public by revealing the relationship between the writer and the subject” (personal communication, September 11, 2011). And it is in this holistic relationship between the writer, the subject, and the reader that the transformative power of the text to change and not just inform actually dwells. Concluding Remarks And so dear family of researchers, if you have read this far, there should be a few things that are quite obvious at this point. First of all, the epistolary genre has given us unexpected insights into Maxine Greene’s private and public life that another research “method” would not be able to provide. This is because a letter is supposed to be personal and as such, it has the potential to create visceral and emotional connections as it informs us of the concrete events of life itself. We have only scratched the surface in this chapter in considering the power of this genre to bring change through the cultivation of the writer’s deeply personal voice rather than suppressing it in the name of objectivity and the quest for “pure” Cartesian rationality. Perhaps we need to consider afresh some of the examples from history to witness the value of “making the personal the political” (Richardson, 2003, p. 506). Martin Luther King’s (1963) Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he wrote in a very personal genre to eight White local clergymen, comes to mind immediately. That letter changed history. Secondly, anyone who is considered to be “the most important American philosopher on education since John Dewey” (Baum, 2003, p. 1) would certainly have to live in a continual tension between public life and private reflection. As all of the letters have testified, Greene’s public actions wonderfully correspond to her private thoughts and written theories because they so strongly emphasize the need for continual reflection, action,

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and embodiment of one’s beliefs. The letters cited in this chapter provide a widely diverse yet unified rendering of Greene’s inward humility, largeness of heart, and “wide-awakeness” that keeps her continually reaching out to be “what she is not yet.” The dialectic between self-knowledge and the perception of others about who we are must be a continual part of the curriculum of real life for all of us. In this wonderful journey of being, it is only natural to look for those who have lived long enough and reflected deeply on themes that challenge our minds and imaginations as we question and explore the huge gaps between what is and what should be in our own lives, in schools, in communities, and in nations. Self-perception and doubt can play tricks on us at times when questions of our own significance arise. I am certain that Maxine Greene has experienced this for most of her life. I would go so far as to say it is because she never has claimed to have “arrived,” that she honestly questions her actions and has learned to live in the tension between public self and private vision that she is indeed an extraordinary person, philosopher, and teacher. This excerpt from a letter I received from Maxine further confirms her own view of incompleteness in such a lovely and personal way, I must include it here. I am not a Freire, not a Myles Horton, not a Sonia Nieto, not so many I admire. Then I realized that the point was not to identify me with the Freires— alive or dead. I am not sure at all if I merited such sensitive attention; and I am amazed by the number of letters you apparently have received—maybe because people empathize with someone they somehow recognize—someone who still strives, imagines an unattainable possibility, is never sure, still reaches beyond herself—and wants to believe she is what she is not yet. (personal communication, October 21, 2009)

I have quoted from only 13 out of over 70 letters in this single case study alone and have run out of room here. But all these accounts verify that Maxine Greene’s life and scholarship richly express a situated philosophy. One that is, as Burbules and Abowitz wrote (2009), “decidedly not the view from nowhere. It is, and recognizes itself to be, a practice always carried out by real, material people in all their imperfections and circumstances. Ambition, insecurity, stubbornness, generosity, competitiveness, aggression, and kindness—all the human virtues and vices are a part of its practice” (Burbules & Abowitz, 2009, p. 269; emphasis mine). I am keenly aware that as a critical research family, this is what we want to be known for, both in the present and for all of us I hope, on into the twilight of our lives. Your fellow inquirer, Robert Lake

100   R. LAKE .

Note 1. All the citations from Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation with Maxine Greene are used with permission from Teachers College Press.

References Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech genres and other late essays. (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Baum, J. (2003). Maxine Greene, philosopher & aesthete. Education Update Online, 1(2). Retrieved from http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.proxy.lib.utk.edu:90/ hww/results Burbules, N., & Abowitz, K. (2009). A situated philosophy of education. In R. Glass (Ed.), Philosophy of Education Society yearbook, 2008 (pp. 268–276). Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. de Castell, S. (2010). Big Maxine and little Maxine. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 75–78). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (Eds.). (1998). The landscape of qualitative research. London, UK: Sage. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury. Freire, P. (1978). Pedagogy in process: The letters to Guinea-Bissau. New York, NY: Seabury. Freire, P. (1996). Letters to Cristina: Reflections on my life and work. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Boulder, CO. Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. King, M. L. (1963). Letter from a Birmingham jail. The Atlantic Monthly, 212(2), 78–88. Kohli, W. (2010). Breaking through the crust. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 54–56). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2010). Our imaginarium. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 121–123). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Lake, R. (2010). Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation  with Maxine Greene. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lake, R. (2011, April 8). Opening remarks. Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation: AERA Division B Symposium, New Orleans, LA.

Letters as Windows Into a Life of Praxis    101 McKenna, M. (2010). A gifted teacher. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 102–104). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Meier, D. (2010). Free people need public spaces. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 34–36). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Miller, J. L. (2010). Coming together to act on the possibility of repair. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 158–163). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Moffett, J. (1968). Teaching the universe of discourse. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Nieto, S. (2008). Dear Paulo: Letters from those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Nieto, S. (2010). Foreword. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. ix–xi). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Pinar, W. (2010). An anxiety of influence. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 56–58). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Provenzo, E. (2010). Academic courage and grace: A case study from Maxine Greene. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 108–109). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Richardson, L. (2003). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (2nd ed., pp. 499–541). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rose, M. (2010). Imagining the possible. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 1–3). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Schubert, B. (2010). With relentless possibility. In R. Lake (Ed.), Dear Maxine: Letters from the unfinished conversation with Maxine Greene (pp. 110–112). New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation: Dialogues on transforming education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.

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Part II Critical Research With/in Educational Settings and Communities

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Chapter 6

Flexible, Reciprocal, and On-Site Research Developing Praxis That Productively Challenges All Participants in a U.S. Urban School Community Patricia Paugh The University of Massachusetts Boston Jorgeline Abbate-Vaughn Geoff Rose Abstract In this chapter, the authors present a case study collaboratively researched by a team consisting of two teacher educators and one teacher. Both the university and school research partners were from public institutions in the same urban location, both greatly influenced over the past decade by accountability practices related to NCLB policy as well as narrowing of opportunities for English-language learners through the adoption of “English-Only” legislation. The chapter argues for a reciprocal, flexible, and locally focused research that values the broad range of perspectives in an educational setting, taking care to ask critical questions of the power relationships between the university, school district, teachers, and students as it evolves. The case study offered

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 105–127 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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106    P. PAUGH, J. ABBATE-VAUGHN, and G. ROSE here uses critical participatory action research (Kemmis & McTaggert, 2000) as well as mediated discourse analysis (Scollan & Scollan, 2004) methods to explore the power of knowledge generated through the shared contributions of teachers, students, and university-based teacher educators in this urban school community. The methodology afforded researchers an opportunity to both understand and demonstrate a developing “nexus of practice”; that is, a fluid building of a culture in which all participants, teachers, teacher educators, and students participated as both experts and novices as they navigated the political environment of a “turnaround school” in a district where NCLB and Race to the Top legislation has greatly influenced school reform. Learning cannot be “transferred in a discrete package, no matter how flexible or well-designed.” —Webster-Wright, 2009, p. 703

In the era leading up to and including NCLB, federal funding for literacy programs in the United States became increasingly dependent upon linking test score performance with prescribed and mandated curriculum (Dudley-Marling & Paugh, 2005). The belief that getting all students on the same page would equalize opportunities for success in U.S. schools is a “common sense” belief that resonates well with the voting public but has not played out in improving the achievement gap between privileged and nonprivileged groups of students after more than a decade of implementation (Morrell & Noguera, 2011). This chapter does not argue against accountability but for a reciprocal, flexible, and locally focused research in the interests of those least privileged in today’s schools. The case offered here demonstrates the power of knowledge generated through the shared contributions of teachers, students, and university-based teacher educators in an urban school community, in which all are positioned as agents rather than reactors in designing curriculum and instruction. Here we focus on teachers’ professional learning using a lens of “critical praxis.” That is, contrary to objectivist epistemologies that privilege a theory-practice binary, critical praxis suggests knowledge generation as cycles of integration between theory, practice, research, and action with ongoing questions about the influences of power in how these transform institutions and beliefs (Freire, 1970; Hollingworth & Sockett, 1994; Lather, 1986). This challenges embedded school culture in which historically professional development and classroom curriculum adoption has steadfastly privileged “banking” and “delivery” models. Such models consider knowledge to exist independently of the influences of social context (Webster-Wright, 2009). Praxis also provides an alternate to models of educational research as “scientifically based” processes that reinforce the divide between the “researcher” and “researched”; in which the power of the university researcher to speak for those schools and communities dominates (Blanchette & Zion, 2011).

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We argue for educational research that is systematic, reciprocal, flexible, and locally focused as a moral imperative for school-focused study. That is, research questions and designs emerge in relationship to the interests of participants on-site, while the process also invites and regenerates theory from the broader culture to work within specific historical, political, and social contexts. In the case study shared here, this broader context, which includes the school district, the university teacher education program, and the literacy and teacher education professional communities, all stand to benefit from the local. Contexts for Professional Learning— University Large-Group, School-Based Team, Classroom Community This case study follows the developing praxis of teachers and teacher educators as they worked with Systemic Functional Linguistics, a theory that focuses on the integration of language and context. The case uses participatory and discourse analysis methods to track knowledge generation by teachers, their students, and teacher educators across three settings: two large-group professional development meetings located at the university, small school-based “team” planning meetings on-site at a nearby elementary school, and activities in two classrooms at that site. Participatory Action Research (cf. Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000) and eventually Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollan, 2001) are methods for praxis research; that is, reciprocal, flexible, and locally focused and acknowledge the academic and personal interests of students who attend school under constantly shifting conditions of urban school “reform” in which local funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) remain invisible and untapped when top-down curriculum prevails. Context and Participants Across the Three Settings In the fall of 2009, the two university partners were invited by this large urban district’s reading coordinator to develop and facilitate professional development focused on connecting science and literacy instruction. The district’s invitation was partly motivated by its adoption of a new reading series that placed greater emphasis on reading and writing informational texts. The participants primarily included the two university teacher education faculty who were from an urban public university; a team that included teacher leader Geof Rose and his five teacher colleagues (two classroom teachers, one “inclusion” teacher, one English as a Second Lan-

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guage teacher, and one science specialist, known here as team “B”); and their 4th- and 5th-grade students. Additionally, the larger university-based professional development group included two 4th- and 5th-grade teams (“A” and “C”) from other district schools. The school principals and the district reading director also attended the larger group sessions. Two of the three schools involved (“B” and “C”) were designated as “underperforming” due to patterns of low scores on state accountability testing. Despite a decade of NCLB reform, an achievement “gap” remained between this district and more economically advantaged communities, as was true for all high-poverty urban and rural districts in the state. Student racial demographics in all three schools mirrored those in many large U.S. school districts where the majority of students are of color (87%), while over half the teacher population identified as White (62%). At least three quarters of the district’s families live in or near poverty levels (74% free and reduced-price lunch, 45% receive food stamps). In addition, 45% of district’s students speak a primary language other than English (School District Web Page, Retrieved August 2011. Specific citation withheld to preserve confidentiality). Methodology for Critical Praxis Research: PAR and Mediated Discourse Analysis Patterns of professional learning across the times and spaces of the 5-month professional development project challenged strongly embedded institutional practices that assume learning to be a linear “top down” process (Webster-Wright, 2009) in which information and instructional practices are expected to be delivered “to” teachers, “implemented” in classrooms with the effect of knowledge as “received” by students who demonstrate that knowledge on high-stakes testing. Research methods that tracked learning across the project instead demonstrated knowledge development based on interactions between multiple knowers positioned intermittently as experts, as novices, and as partners framed by attention to the immediate context. These methods, which fall within a school of critical praxis research (Kress, 2011) included participatory action research and mediated discourse analysis. The methodology shaped what Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) describe as “counterhegemonic inquiry,” in which knowledge develops from the “intentional conceptual blurring” of theory and practice rather than “as a by-product of the distanced and sometimes inpenetrable theorizing of those outside of schools and other contexts of practices” (pp. 3–4).

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Participatory Action Research as Key to Critical Praxis The project design adopted methods of participatory action research (PAR) (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000) to study questions of how teachers made meaning of the SFL theory as they created units of study. Participatory methods support a stance that invites more equitable research relationships between university and school-based partners who share mutual interests in equitable school reform. Both communities often ask different questions and seek different outcomes within such collaborative partnerships (McLaughlin, Black-Hawkins, Brindley, McIntyre, & Taber, 2006). A critical focus on power is a necessary dimension when negotiating and renegotiating throughout the research relationship to ensure that multiple perspectives continue to be represented (Blanchette & Zion, 2011). Participatory action research involves cycles of data collection, reflection, and analysis that frame this negotiation. As will be developed below, the questions, methodology, and types of participation emerged as this case evolved, eventually focusing iteratively on the following: • What happens when SFL/Genre theory is introduced to 4th- and 5th-grade teachers in urban schools designated as “underperforming” within the context of a professional development project linking science and literacy learning? • How did teachers make meaning of this theory in their classroom practice? • What learning happened through this process and by whom? Over the course of the semester, all three research partners collected and analyzed data such as documents, photos, video, e-mails between facilitators and teachers, and field notes. These were collected across three sites: (a) large-group professional development sessions in February and May; (b) weekly team meetings in school “B,” where teacher Rose was actively involved as a leader of the teacher team; and (c) 4th- and 5th-grade classrooms in school “B.” Both facilitators and teacher leader Rose analyzed the data during the active collection cycles and in the summer following the project. Rose provided an insider perspective through face-to-face meetings where student data was analyzed as well as through e-mail communication wherein he provided additional information to challenge or support emerging claims. The research collaboration between university researchers and a teacher researcher is considered an important dimension to this methodology. It can be described as “complementary collaboration.” As Yu (2011) explains,

110    P. PAUGH, J. ABBATE-VAUGHN, and G. ROSE As the name suggests, complementary collaboration is characterized by a division of labor in terms of skills, effort, and roles. It does not require all collaborators to carry out the same task, but rather requires a synergy built on each other’s differences. (p. 16)

Given the significance of this study within the context of a school setting, such collaboration among researchers lends trustworthiness to the insider perspective, which was integral to analyzing, representing, and acting on the findings. It also challenged the university teacher educators to reconstruct their facilitation of the project. Below we explore how SFL theories mediated learning for the team members as well as that of their students, their colleagues in the original large professional development group, and the teacher educators who facilitated across the three settings of the project. We also share how the evolution of the analysis invited the use of mediated discourse analysis (Scollan, 2001) as an additional methodology. What is Mediated Discourse Theory? Scollan’s (2001) theory of mediation, specifically the constructs of “nexus of practice” and “sites of engagement,” provided analytical support as patterns of learning emerged across all three settings were linked to the use of SFL theory. Clear patterns of social action around texts emerged, contributing to a richer linguistic discourse among teachers and students within the classroom; among team members, including team members and facilitators; and eventually within the larger professional development conversation at the second May meeting. These interactions, or what Scollan terms “sites of engagement” became “point(s) of social change in the habitus of the participants” (p. 171). Nexus analysis (Scollan, 2001; Scollan & Scollan, 2004) provided a methodology with clear connection to SFL/Genre theories. Mediated discourse analysis extends the concept of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to a more fluid construct called “nexus of practice,” in which action is the unit of study. The premise of MDA is that society and culture are constituted in material products as well as discursive practices. Here, taken-for-granted practices can be made visible by studying sites of engagement or moments in real time when multiple social practices intersect at unique moments in history. The action research cycles in this case identified such sites of engagement; that is, moments in which texts were analyzed by participants leading to changes in literacy practices. Patterns of such engagement with texts across the professional development project (the large-group

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professional development, the school teams, and in the classrooms) were identified. Nexus analysis as a form of critical discourse analysis (Scollan, 2001) was used to capture productive uses of power that challenged existing institutional expectations about professional and student learning, including that of the university facilitators, usually considered the “experts” in professional learning settings or the teacher, usually considered the “expert” within the classroom. Analysis focused on sites of engagement encouraged “resmiotization,” or reconstruction of meaning; practices are made visible in order for all participants, in this case both teacher educators and teachers, to redefine and reconceptualize them in action (Scollan & Scollan, 2004). Below, several “sites of engagement” across all three settings are analyzed beginning and ending with the large-group professional setting to demonstrate how SFL theory interacted with funds of knowledge valued by teachers, students, and facilitators to support the goals and intentions of all. Although the participants and settings varied, activities that were identified as sites of engagement fit a similar pattern: reciprocal learning through text analysis. These patterns occurred in all three settings and are displayed in bold text in Figure 6.1, where the gear graphic suggests the reciprocity of learning across the times and settings as well as between participants.

Environmental print Text analysis/feature posters Text analysis/read alouds Text production/design projects Classroom Activities

Cross-text analysis/anchor charts Student Presentations Garden Notebook Activities

“Team” Planning Meetings Professional Development Large Group Creating Text Sets Generating Rationale & Questions Genre Sort Unit Planning for lang/content/social goals Sharing Practices Designing materials Logistics: How to gcreat a garden

Figure 6.1  Sites of engagement.

Derewianka Book Reading/Activities Cross-Text Analysis “Tree” theme Text Analysis/Features Facilitator ppts/video Interschool sharing

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Setting #1: Large-Group Professional Development Meetings The university facilitators, teachers, principals, and the district coordinator met twice in February and May for full-day professional development sessions at the university. The facilitators were teacher educators interested in preparing and retaining effective teachers for urban schools as well as researching issues of urban education reform. They believed in highexpectations instruction that was also culturally, linguistically, and socially responsive to students in an urban environment. Therefore, they adopted sociocultural and sociolinguistic epistemologies that view language and literacy as social processes rather than decontextualized skillsets. They also advocated for socially just pedagogies in which teacher and student agency were valued in curriculum design. Theory Rather Than “Best Practices” With this in mind, the choice was made to bypass traditional professional development designs that offer a set of “best practices” for teachers to replicate in their classrooms and instead designed the semester-long professional development project around a sociolinguistic theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978). SFL theory has been in use in Australian literacy education for several decades but is just recently of interest to U.S. educators who are working with multilingual students (cf. Schleppegrell, 2004). SFL posits that no texts exist independently of context. The theory provides linguistic information that enables teachers and students to examine genres, including the academic genres valued for school success. Genres are patterns of language used within larger cultural contexts, in this case, of schooling. Simultaneously, the theory provides linguistic support for teachers and students to craft language more finely to meet the social and linguistic demands of the immediate situation. This language at the level of the situation is known as register. Teachers and students who examine register (situationally focused language features for specific purposes and audiences) consider and critique how the consumption and production of texts interact with the social context. SFL genre and register constructs provide linguistic tools for students to gain familiarity with academic language necessary for a deeper knowledge of academic disciplines while also developing positions of power over their reading and writing within those disciplines. (cf. Knapp & Watkins, 2005; Schleppegrell, 2004 for in depth explanation of pedagogies based on SFL/Genre theories). For example, scientific texts not only describe the natural world, but in many cases authors of such texts seek to control that world. Students who are able

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to analyze scientific discourses expand their linguistic repertoires to both participate in and critique those discourses (Martin & Rose, 2008). The university facilitators designed the professional development project with the intention to support teachers’ autonomy by providing SFL theory as a cultural tool that would support and mediate their instructional design of a science literacy unit. In line with constructivist epistemologies based on the work of Vygotsky and Luria, cultural tools are either linguistic or nonlinguistic mediators of learning through social action (Scollan, 2001). The intention of the professional development was to value teachers as instructional agents, as opposed to dominant professional development that positions teachers and consequently their students as receivers and implementers of curriculum formats usually predetermined by outside authorities. Reframing Professional Development as Praxis: Not So Easy Although the grant for professional development originated from the district literacy administration, in actuality, the facilitators quickly discovered that creating spaces with teachers to integrate elementary science and literacy was fraught with challenges. In fact, as the project commenced, two of the three schools (“B” and “C”) were identified as “turnaround schools.” This meant that during the time of the project, the students and teachers knew that the principal would be leaving, and at least half of their teachers would lose their positions or be transferred to other schools for the following year. This political uncertainty exacerbated an instability already present in the school communities that were located in a high-needs school district and in high-poverty neighborhoods. Additionally, within this major U.S. city school district, strong boundaries between content subjects existed, and constraints on instructional time were imposed on their classroom teaching by the school schedule. Specifically, barriers to connecting included the district’s expectation that reading instruction adhere to a paced and scripted reading curriculum, a set calendar that limited delivery of science kits to specialist teachers at only specific times, and frequent interruptions in continuity due to testing and test preparation activities. In addition, the majority of professional development practices were usually of the training-model variety in which teachers expected packaged “best practices” on how to implement commercial programs rather than preparation that positioned them as designers and creators of their classroom learning environments. This was evidenced in the reactions of teacher participants from all three schools at the initial large-group professional development session. When asked to analyze reg-

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ister features of a narrative text and compare it to an informational text on the same science topic, strong voices derailed the discussion: “This was not what we signed up for.” “We do ‘program x’ in our school so we already have curriculum where students know how to take notes from texts and keep notebooks for science, so we really don’t need to know this.” “We can’t use these ideas because we have to use the script from the literacy curriculum.” “Our science unit themes do not match the unit themes from the reading series so connecting a literacy unit to science is not possible.” (Field notes, February 25, 2010)

These reactions are typical when the habitus for professional development privileges technique over intellectual work (Moje, Sutherland, Cleveland, & Heitzman, 2005; Thwait, 2006; Webster-Wright, 2009). The university facilitators immediately found themselves caught between their beliefs about how best to support teacher autonomy and the realities of teachers’ perspectives within a politically charged urban setting. Thus, developing praxis for critical science literacy education was a challenge for both teachers and university teacher educators. Later in the chapter, the large-group setting will be revisited with a focus on the contribution that school-based knowledge offered in addressing this challenge. Setting #2: Team “B” School-Based Meetings For all of the three 4th- and 5th-grade teacher “teams” who were introduced to SFL and Genre theories as part of this semester-long professional development project, these pressures were difficult to surmount. However, the team from school “B” eventually accomplished the grant functions that the other two teams did not. These included choosing a shared unit of study that connected science and literacy, meeting weekly for planning sessions with all team members (a 4th-grade teacher, a 5th-grade teacher, and two specialists in ESL and Special Education), implementing a pre- and postwriting sample, and systematically initiating classroom instruction that drew on SFL theory, specifically register and genre. As the teachers’ action research (another project component) developed, the university facilitators Paugh and Abbate-Vaughn asked to participate as partners in their action research as the team developed more permeable relationships between literacy and science content instruction and between teachers’ and students’ learning.

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Sites of Engagment: Using SFL Theory to Explore Texts for Authentic Purposes When team “B” returned to their school, they began planning a unit that considered a range of political, personal, and community needs. From the perspective of teacher Rose, SFL genre and register offered at the large group session initially were hard to connect to his teaching. Similar to the other two teams, school “B” teachers initially considered the project of developing a science/literacy unit to be yet another demand on an already full teaching schedule. Yet, as they reflected on the political realities affecting the school community as well as the needs and interests of their students as members of that community, they drew on their own knowledge and expertise. Navigating Institution and Community: Keeping Both in Mind Out of the three schools, school “B” teachers moved most flexibly within and outside of the dominant discourse to consider opportunities offered by these new theories. Most importantly, they chose a unit based on the social context in which they were teaching and their students were learning. As mentioned earlier, school “B” was undergoing what is known as a “turnaround” process. The “B” teachers chose a garden unit, as they felt it would apprentice students as agents in building something sustainable for their community. In creating a raised-bed garden in an area with little green space, students would use science as a means for community building. Among the texts chosen to initiate the unit of study was Tupac Shakur’s (1999) The Rose That Grew From Concrete: Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature’s law is wrong it learned to walk without having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping it’s dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.

As a result, their unit plan included goals intended to be socially meaningful to the students as well as the traditional academic goals to which they and their students were held accountable. An excerpt from their unit plan, for example, indicates that despite not following the script of the reading series or fitting exactly into the district’s science schedule, the academic focus drew directly from curriculum requirements such as the topic of “Reaching Goals” found in the reading series, state curriculum standards for learning about plant growth, and the professional development focus on SFL genre and register features of informational texts.

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Teachers’ Expertise Meets Language Theory Although the institutional discourse presented obstacles for the teams, for school “B” it also provided a nexus in which to consider genre and register as tools for authentic literacy practices. Out of the three schools, school “B” teachers moved within the dominant discourse while they simultaneously explored opportunities offered by these new theories to navigate the barriers presented by district mandates. At the time, the district was asking teachers to prepare students to write personal narratives, as these were an essential component in the upcoming high-stakes composition test. The district was also sponsoring the professional development grant, and schools involved were “required” to hold school-based meetings to choose, plan, and order sets of trade books while preparing their science literacy unit. In these mandates, school “B” teachers saw an authentic need for “concrete linguistics” provided by the SFL/Genre theory (Fang, 2005). For example, the act of ordering trade books for science instruction suggested how genre knowledge could address their professional learning needs. As they submitted orders, facilitators noticed that their lists contained only fictional narratives on their chosen theme, “plants and gardening.” Questioned about these choices, the teachers quickly admitted a lack of familiarity with structures and uses of informational genres and then requested further support in using SFL theories to augment their knowledge: “Would you compare and contrast the genre features of a few books? Not sure if we will have them yet but that would be great!” (Team “B” e-mail to facilitators, April 28, 2010). Using genre and register as theoretical tools, the school “B” team and the facilitators created a “text analysis/genre sort,” which was a text-focused site of engagement in which they analyzed and compared features of trade books that they chose to order as well as books provided by the facilitators. The workshop required intellectual work for teachers as they adopted new language theory to strengthen their instructional goals and took a critical stance toward curriculum mandates, an alternative to imposed “best practices” training. It also required the facilitators to create responsive professional development at the point at which theory met teachers’ questions about how different text types, such as a fictional narrative or poetry, could contribute to science learning alongside more informational genres. SFL/Genre theory mediated learning for both teachers and teacher educators through their joint activity at this site of engagement around texts. This joint activity in turn focused the SFL theory for a useful and authentic purpose, serving to mediate knowledge for the team’s instructional designs; an integration of theory, action, and evolving practice. In the following section, analysis shifts the site of engagement to the classroom setting and continues to follow teacher Rose’s ongoing praxis as a literacy educator.

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Setting #3: Fourth-Grade Classroom Originally, we coined the term “initiating texts” to explain the language learning witnessed throughout school “B” interactions. Halliday’s (1978) conception of texts as both constructive of, and constructed by, the culture was evident. The genre sort workshop above (i.e., in which teachers explored text features across several genres and discussed how these texts could be effectively incorporated for teaching science concepts) provided teachers with new linguistic knowledge. The workshop also introduced new trade books into the curriculum through teachers’ book orders and finally, as will be demonstrated below, supported classroom-based analyses in which the same texts created spaces for shared learning and even spaces for the creation of new text materials to support that learning. However, the term above seemed limited to simply the texts alone and did not fully identify these interactions between learners around texts. Therefore, upon further investigation into social learning theory, Scollan’s (2001) theory of mediation was chosen to provide constructs with better explanatory power for the patterns observed. From this theory, the idea of “sites of engagement” provided means to analyze patterns reflected by the example below drawn from Rose’s classroom as it included both discursive and material artifacts. “You Learn What You Teach . . .” A series of discussions between Rose and his students, related to “readalouds” from the science-themed trade books, provides an example of a site of engagement that became a “point of social change” for the teacher and his students. After engaging in an existing instructional practice—readaloud and discussion of a narrative fiction selection, “The Ugly Vegetables” (Lin, 1999) with his class—Rose chose the nonfiction informational book, “New Plants” (Lawrence Hall of Science, 2003) to share next. It was at the moment when student Simran (pseudonym) asked, “Why isn’t this in the past tense?” that Rose initiated another traditional instructional practice: charting the students’ discussion, but this time using genre and register concepts to analyze the differences between the two texts. Rose’s action connected Simran’s question with the new concept of register. Ultimately, over the following days, Rose co-constructed a set of anchor charts with his students that resembled and included concepts connected to genre and register he had encountered earlier in the large group session (Figure 6.2). As Rose later explained, “you learn what you teach,” that is, his own learning coalesced in relationship to that of his students. It was a moment when both students and teacher brought together their background knowledge about texts and created new learning in relationship. In doing so, they col-

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Figure 6.2  Language features “anchor” charts.

laboratively constructed new texts for learning (i.e., the anchor charts) to support literacy learning in the classroom. “Great Conversations” Initiate New Materials and Activities for Learning Analyzing texts through conversations with students, Rose strengthened his own concept and interest in register (something he admitted was difficult to connect to in the larger group session) as a helpful tool to help his students consider the functions of language for specific purposes (i.e., context of the situation): This was the best part of the SFL stuff . . . as I was doing read alouds (especially with a non-fiction big book) we had some great conversations about text features of fictional narratives vs. non-fiction books. We were all able to agree that the purposes of our presentations and projects [for the science unit] were to INFORM people about how a seed turns into a plant. (G. Rose, e-mail January 27, 2011)

The learning from this “site of engagement” dialogue leading to creation of the anchor charts can be traced across the datasets to subsequent sites at which genre and register also provided tools for meditated learning in the classroom and for the larger group of project participants. Most directly, drawing on the anchor charts and ongoing conversations about language features and purpose, Rose and his students next consid-

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Figure 6.3  Design rubric for student projects.

ered how they might best use the information they were gathering through their experiences in planting and observing in the garden, recording information from trade books, and from online searches on the topic. Rose first brainstormed presentation ideas with his students for a peer audience. These included PowerPoint presentations, books, labeled diagrams, or comic strip format (see Figure 6.3). Toward the end of their unit, the class chose two purposes for additional writing that keyed into important academic writing genres “procedure” and “report.” These included “Instructions” for teaching peers “how to” grow plants and an “Information Report” to share what they knew about plant growth (Figure 6.4). Through this process, within the context of the situation, students and teacher co-created new learning materials for composition and assessment that spanned different purposes and audiences, both those that drew on existing student interests as well as those important to success within the culture of schooling. These collaboratively created instructional materials,

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Figure 6.4  Rubrics created by author three and students for instructions and information reports.

mediated by SFL genre and register theories, both challenged and valued students as full participants in their learning. Teacher Rose and his students’ collaborative analysis of texts offered a productive link between theory and practice for the facilitators and eventually for others in the second large professional development session held in May. Witnessing how Rose and his team drew on genre and register through charting their text analysis, the facilitators requested that they share evidence of the charting process and photos of the charts. Afterwards, facilitators asked the members of the larger group to return to text analysis activities introduced in the first session. This time teachers from all three teams identified with team “B”’s context for learning. A more engaged, focused, and productive discussion occurred concerning the variety of genres and how they were connected to science learning. The May session (small-group charting and discussion of SFL theory) is recorded as a site of engagement (“Text Analysis/Features” activity, in Figure 6.1). Appropriating, Mixing, and Remixing the Scientific With the “Everyday” The multidirectional sharing of expertise offered another counter to the linear “delivery” relationship. As the unit developed, the valuing of shared expertise directly created a rich cultural context for learning sci-

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ence within school “B” classrooms, in which a rich flow of learning of both science and language was observed through a variety of learning spaces. These included the read-aloud discussions mentioned above; participation in a “design” project, which included scaffolded exploration of Internet resources and development of a poster or PowerPoint presentation (Figure 6.3); and of course the experience of planning, planting, and recording observations of the garden’s progress. Science explorations, such as that of dissection of a bean seed and planting beans in the classroom, offered focused science lab experiences to supplement their garden activity. The students kept science notebooks for observing their planting experiences and connecting these to specific vocabulary outlined in the curriculum. Each student also engaged in several composing activities as described above, a presentation aimed to inform teachers and peers, a piece of more “school-like” writing of a procedural or report text, as well as a postwriting prompt, “How does a seed grow?” A culture of shared expertise created a classroom culture that reflects Halliday’s (1993, p. 93) notion of “learning how to mean”; a culture that valued students’ own ideas and invited them to explore language within a context in which they were producers of meaning. Teacher Rose built on the initial “genre workshop” and continued to expand the availability of multiple text types, both print and digital, some teacher-chosen, and others discovered online by students. This offered a rich set of resources, beyond the curriculum materials, through which students researched and explained their experiences while planting and observing seed growth. Deeper learning occurred as students appropriated new language, mixing this with their own ways with words and ideas. Lessig (2005, as cited in Knobel & Lankshear, 2008) summarized the cultural context created in Rose’s 4th-grade classroom: “Every single act of reading and choosing and criticizing and praising culture is in this sense remix, and it is through this general practice that cultures get made.” SFL theorists argue that an awareness of the forms and functions of language is necessary to help students distinguish between “everyday” uses of language and the abstract language necessary for deeper understanding of disciplinary content as in the sciences. In the act of appropriating, mixing, and remixing texts, the 4th-grade students in Rose’s school “B” classroom made connections to more challenging ideas through their “everyday” ways with words while also increasing their access and ability to utilize more technical and discipline-specific language. Knobel and Lankshear (2008) argue that instructional practices that value what students do with language in their everyday lives is lost potential when not utilized in school: “Remixing practices that are already familiar to schoolage learners could be highlighted by teachers in educationally productive ways to help learners relate what they already know and can do as remixers to aspects of their classroom learning” (p. 29).

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Student interactions around their presentations (all chose posters or PowerPoint) and in the multimodal presentation texts themselves, provided ongoing sites of engagement in which their academic language developed. Below, analyses of a classroom interaction illustrates how students’ language showed growth in the knowledge they would need for academic success while valuing their own autonomy as learners. As the goal of scientific knowledge is to understand and explain the natural world (and some say learn to control that world), communications for these purposes includes building meanings as taxonomies that classify and describe phenomena and/or explain systems of relationships (Martin & Rose, 2008). Students in Rose’s class engaged in building meanings as they designed their projects in pairs and groups. Analyzing their talk provides insight into their ownership of their academic learning. Learning the Language of “Explanation” While Designing a PowerPoint Presentation In developing the scientific field, speakers and authors use genres of description, explanation, and argument. In the following excerpt, students DD and Gilbert drew on their PowerPoint project to explain “how a seed grows” to facilitator Paugh, who was visiting in their classroom. The excerpt below is followed by an analysis: Note: Actions noted in italics, emphasis in speech in CAPS Gilbert: (pointing to screen where a PowerPoint slide is on display) Carbon dioxide is what they . . . they . . . inhale and like, it’s what they EAT. . . . . Paugh: Mmm hmmm DD: (looking at and reading from the screen) And . . . heat is the sun . . . (looks up) sun is the heat to make it warmer so that it can grow . . . Gilbert: And the soil is what makes the root want to stay inside . . . it makes (looking up to ceiling as if thinking) . . . it makes the flower SHOOT up . . . and become a mature plant . . . and (pointing to screen) what you see is germination. Paugh: And what’s germination? Gilbert and DD: (move PowerPoint to next screen) Paugh: AH! Now we’ll find out . . . so what’s germination? DD: (reading from screen) A plant germinates and grows radicle and . . . and . . . (tries to sound out a word on the screen) . . . co . . . conatowns . . . (smiles as he tries to decode the word on the screen) Gilbert: (jumps in) Coloteptals.

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Paugh: Now if you’re explaining . . . and I’m your audience . . . even though I’m an adult . . . I don’t know what radicals and (slowly reads) coleoptiles are . . . Gilbert: If you . . . if you look at the picture (moves the laptop to angle it more in P’s line of vision) . . . you can see that a radicle is a baby root (both point to diagram on screen) Paugh: Aha . . . that is REALLY helpful . . . okay . . . and what’s a (reads slowly) a coleoptile? Gilbert: (with DD also speaking in background) It is a baby stem. DD: (repeats) It’s a baby stem. Gilbert: Also a seed has germination . . . Paugh: And what’s that mean? Gilbert: Germination is when a seed . . . DD: (jumps in) When a seed passes on to the next life cycle (Video Excerpt, May 21, 2010) In the above example, choosing to combine printed statements with diagrams on a PowerPoint slide, DD and Gilbert were able to orally present the process of germination to an audience (Figure 6.5). Teacher Rose understood that their social culture already affords youth the opportunities to work with multiple modes of communication. He invited this expertise into his ongoing conversations with his students: From the non-fiction texts we were also able to see how a great picture can be the main focus of a page or poster and the words around the picture can explain what is happening in the picture . . . for a very visual generation, it was

Figure 6.5  DD and Gilbert PowerPoint slide.

124    P. PAUGH, J. ABBATE-VAUGHN, and G. ROSE helpful for them to start with a picture that they found online and then use the picture to communicate their ideas. (G. Rose, e-mail, January 27, 2011)

Facilitator Paugh was initially skeptical when she observed students’ PowerPoints, thinking that they were “merely cutting and pasting images, words, and diagrams” (Paugh, fieldnotes, May 21, 2010) without a real understanding of the content. However, conversations including the interview above with DD and Gilbert, as well as analysis across students’ PowerPoint, poster, and writing samples was convincing support that students’ appropriation, mixing, and remixing of both linguistic texts as well as multimodal texts was the vehicle for deeper conceptual and linguistic learning. What is available in this spoken exchange is how these boys are playing simultaneously with both ideas and language. For example, Gilbert is considering the role of carbon dioxide as related to human body functions such as eating and inhaling. DD and Gilbert, in the process of designing their presentation, are making sense out of the role of soil and sun for providing nutrients through roots, stems, and leaves: “Sun is the heat to make it warmer so that it can grow” and “Soil is what makes the root want to stay inside.” These are examples of their gradual formation of ideas. In addition, it is important to note the positioning between author/speaker and reader/listener; it is clear that the speakers, DD and Gilbert, are the experts who have a lot to teach an adult. Shared expertise was evident in that the adult was able to pronounce the term “coleoptile,” but it was the student speakers who could explain its meaning. Taking pride in the sophisticated terms they found online, such as “radicle” and “coleoptile” (terms not on the 4th-grade school science vocabulary list), prompted further engagement and active interest by the students in extending their learning as both a social and academic pursuit. That is, DD, Gilbert, and their peers demonstrated ownership that comes from claiming important ideas for personal reasons, not simply to answer questions on a test to be forgotten tomorrow. Conclusion: Flexible, Reciprocal, and On-Site Research as a Moral Imperative Although we don’t wish to re-create a linear or boundary-driven summary of this case study, we will return to Figure 6.1 to reflect on how this research supported the argument that schools can support academic growth as they also prepare students as designers and critical participants in that learning, a message that seems to be missing from reductionist arguments for easily measureable, hierarchical, and prescriptive pedagogies espoused in the era of NCLB. In fact, returning to the gears that graphically represent the reci-

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procity between participants and settings in building the rich linguistic and scientific learning environment in teacher Rose’s classroom, we realize that this is the best that can be done in a two-dimensional print setting, but the relationships should be considered far more permeable. The graphic is helpful, however, in demonstrating how a nexus of practice emerged, mediated by a focus on SFL theory as a cultural tool to encourage student power and ownership over their literacy practices; as they developed deeper linguistic knowledge connected to success in the academic world. Both are vital, especially for students from nondominant linguistic or cultural backgrounds, such as the students in teacher Rose’s classroom, who are often denied access to academic content when they are not directly taught how English works (Brisk & Zisselsberger, 2011). An additional barrier for students in this state was English-Only legislation, which was put into effect in tandem with NCLB legislation more than 10 years ago. Such legislation also devalues diversity, assuming rigid conceptions of “academic English,” in which primary and social languages are discounted. This is an alienating experience that further inhibits such students’ interest in academics (Hand et al., 2003; Lemke, 1998). For teachers such as those in the case presented here, challenging their own perspectives with new theoretical learning about language and culture is necessary to best serve their students. However, as this case illustrated, the theory could not work outside of the context of the local. Analyzing sites of engagement in the project afforded researchers an opportunity to both understand and demonstrate a developing “nexus of practice,” in which the theory served as a cultural tool, resembling James Gee’s (2007) notion of a “smart tool,” such as those found in video games in which the tool use and tool user “each have knowledge that must be integrated together” (p. 34). In this case, it served to support the participants (teachers, students, and university teacher educators) in the classroom, where the inclusion and use of multiple texts supported the purposeful learning of science; and it also served as a mediator for teachers and teacher educators to reconstruct their habitus as a learning community in which professional learning was reciprocal and context focused. The chapter demonstrates that critical and participatory methods create deeper understandings of the challenges and affordances of negotiated learning within the complexity of the NCLB-era public schooling. For urban schools where students and teachers are particularly vulnerable to constantly shifting curriculum “implementations” and unstable school environments, we argue that it is a moral imperative to value reciprocal, flexible, and locally focused research that explores academic learning in the interests of urban students and their teachers, such as those in this case study.

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References Blanchette, W., & Zion, S. (2011). Asking the right questions in urban education research: The role of privilege. In K. Scott & W. Blanchette (Eds.), Research in urban settings: Lesson learned and implications for future practice (pp. 21–38). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Brisk, M., & Zisselsberger, M. (2011). “We’ve let them in on the secret”: Using SFL theory to improve the teaching of writing to bilingual learners. In T. Lucas (Ed.), Teacher preparation for linguistically diverse classrooms: A resource for teacher educators (pp. 111–126). New York, NY: Routledge. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner inquiry for the next generation. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Dudley-Marling, C., & Paugh, P. (2005).The rich get richer and the poor get direct instruction. In B. Altwerger (Ed.), Reading for profit: The commercialization of reading instruction (pp. 156–171). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Fang, Z. (2005). Scientific literacy: A systemic functional linguistics perspective. Science Education, 89(2), 335–347. Freire, P. (1993/1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gee, J. (2007). Good video games and good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London, UK: Edward Arnold. Hand, B., Alvermann, D., Gee, J., Guzzetti, B., Norris, S., Phillips, L., . . . Yore, L. (2003). Message from the “Island Group”: What is literacy in science literacy? Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 40(7), 607–615. Hollingsworth, S., & Sockett, H. (1994). Teacher research and educational reform. NSSE Yearbook. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2000). Participatory action research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 567–605). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Knapp, P., & Watkins, M. (2005). Genre, text, grammar: Technologies for teaching and assessing writing. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press. Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2008). Remix: The art and craft of endless hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 22–33. Kress, T. M. (2011). Critical praxis research: Breathing new life into research methods for teachers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard Education Review, 56(3), 257–278. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence Hall of Science (2003). New plants. Nashua, NH: Delta Science Education LLC. Lemke, J. (1998). Multiplying meaning: Visual and verbal semiotics in scientific text. In J. R. Martin & R. Veel (Eds.), Reading science: Critical and functional perspectives on the discourses of science (pp. 87–111). New York, NY: Routledge. Lin, G. (1999). The ugly vegetables. Cambridge, MA: Charlesbridge. Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. London, UK: Equinox.

Flexible, Reciprocal, and On-Site Research    127 McLaughlin, C., Black-Hawkins, K., Brindley, S., McIntyre, D., & Taber, K. (Eds.). (2006). Researching schools: Stories from a schools-university partnership. New York, NY: Routledge. Moje, E. B., Sutherland, L. M., Cleveland, T., & Heitzman, M. (2005, December). Reading and writing in science: Multiple text types in scientific literacy learning. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, Miami, FL. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Morrell E., & Noguera, P. (2011). A framework for change: A broader and bolder approach to school reform. Teachers College Record. Retrieved August 4, 2011 from http://www.tcrecord.org. ID Number 16503. Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Scollan, R. (2001). Action and text: Towards an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action, mediated discourse analysis, and the problem of social action. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 139–183). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Scollan, R., & Scollan, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet. New York, NY: Routledge. Shakur, T. (1999). The rose that grew from concrete. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Thwait, A. (2006). Genre writing in primary school: From theory to the classroom, via First Steps. Australia Journal of Language and Literacy, 29(2), 95–114. Webster-Wright, A. (2009). Reframing professional development through understanding authentic professional learning. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 702–739. Yu, K. (2011). Exploring the nature of researcher-practitioner relationship in qualitative educational research publications. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(7), 785–804. doi:10.1080/09518398.2010.529838

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Chapter 7

Multivoiced Research With Children Exploring Methodological Issues in Children’s Documentation of School Projects Christina Siry University of Luxembourg Carola Mick Université Paris Descartes

Abstract In educational sciences, the gathering of video diaries as a form of “student standpoint research” has become increasingly important, and critical developments in educational ethnography support participatory frameworks of ethnographic research projects. Legitimizing research subjects’ voices through their own data collection corresponds to ethical demands of democratic, dialogical, multivoiced research. In this chapter, we combine perspectives from two different research projects in primary schools in Luxembourg to shed light on the methodological and practical underpinnings of collectively Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 129–145 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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130    C. SIRY and C. MICK gathered audio-visual ethnographic data. Drawing on video data collected by children in schools, we consider ways in which children’s documentation of their school experiences allows for dynamic approaches to space, context, time, reality, and identity. As we analyze the coherence between this kind of multiperspectival data and the demands of ethnographic research, we seek to demonstrate the extents to which such methods allow for an interpretation of institutionally embedded, highly performative, and individualized data authored by the children themselves.

Participatory Approaches to Research With Children Recent research trends on childhood and education call into question the social differences between children and adults and emphasize these “differences” as social constructions (e.g., Yurén, 2008). This shift in perspectives is also documented on a policy level, as evidenced, for example, in the United Nations (1990) Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for a consideration of the children’s point of view in “all matters affecting the child.” Accordingly, critical developments in ethnography (Angrosino & Mays de Pérez, 2003), and classroom ethnography in particular (Eisenhart, 2001; Watson-Gegeo, 1997), suggest participatory frameworks for ethnographic research projects. To facilitate research approaches that work toward seeking “insiders’” perspectives requires the consciousness of subjectivity, the necessity of dialogic methods, and a willingness to consider the “subjects” of a study as research partners (Angrosino & Mays de Pérez 2003, p. 111). In educational sciences, the gathering of video diaries as a form of “student standpoint research” (Thomson & Gunther, 2007) has become increasingly important, and critical developments in educational ethnography support participatory frameworks of ethnographic research projects. Legitimizing research subjects’ voices through their own data collection corresponds to ethical demands of democratic, dialogical, multivoiced research. In this chapter, we combine perspectives from two different research projects in primary schools in Luxembourg to shed light on the methodological and practical underpinnings of collectively gathered audio-visual ethnographic data. Drawing on video data collected by children in schools, we consider ways in which children’s documentation of their school experiences allows for dynamic approaches to space, context, time, reality, and identity. As we analyze the coherence between this kind of multiperspective data and the demands of ethnographic research, we seek to demonstrate the extents to which such methods allow for an interpretation of institutionally embedded, highly performative, and individualized data authored by the children themselves.

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Using children’s documentation as data can increase their role in the research process, as they are in control of the data collection (Einarsdóttir, 2007). We argue that empowering children to be actors who co-design the heteroglossic, complex research structures (Watson-Gegeo, 1994)—as adapted to the social world they are observing—gives them the opportunity to co-design the social reality they as researchers and researched are part of. “In seeking to create and complete their project they also have a stake in making it work” (Thomson & Gunter, 2007, p. 331). In the sections that follow, we examine the complexities of working to incorporate participatory approaches in ethnographic research in the institutional structure of schools and particularly focus on the methodological issues that surface when attempting to structure research around student perspectives at the elementary school level. Our Research Projects With Children in Schools In this chapter, we bring together perspectives gathered from two different research projects in primary schools in Luxembourg to create a combined interpretation. Elaborating on our specific projects, we seek to raise questions for the field on the use of participatory approaches within the institutional structures of schools, in our case, primary schools. Although we explore data from two different contexts, we have not undertaken a comparative study, as the research projects these data come from have never been conceptualized as such. However, our contexts of data collection share some common characteristics, and these characteristics allow for exploring the data in view of methodological and practical underpinnings (and challenges) of the use of collectively gathered audio-visual ethnographic data. There are multitudes of ways that children can participate in educational ethnographic projects, and one of the approaches in our projects is that children participated as authors and as researchers by using videography as a tool to document their perspectives. We seek to draw connections between research projects conducted in different classroom contexts; one at the early primary level and one at the later primary level. We refer to these research studies in this chapter as Project A1 and Project B,2 and in this section we describe the two projects, both of which were situated in multilingual Luxembourgish classrooms during the same academic year (2009–2010). Project A investigated the ways in which children aged 4–8 construct science understandings in interaction with each other. In particular, this study examined the ways in which science is emergent from children’s “doing” in the classroom, and photography was used to document and assess children’s learning of science. Children were shown how to use Kodak Zi8 cameras at the beginning of the study, and they experimented with using

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these cameras to take still shots as well as video. As the children were investigating water, they were able to use the cameras as they felt necessary, and there is a variety of data that has been collected from these cameras, including children’s filming of each other’s investigations, children narrating an investigation, and children discussing an investigation after the fact. In many of these situations, stationary cameras also recorded the ongoing classroom events. The aim of research study B was to investigate the development of a school project by children in a 5th-grade class, in view of analyzing the possibilities of organizational development from within school. Children’s use of Kodak Zi8 cameras to accompany, document, and reflect on the project development was meant to enhance children’s possibilities and power to co-design a “third space” (Gutiérrez, 2008; Kramsch, 1993) within school to allow for transcending its institutional borders. Children were invited to document the activities and experiences they considered as important for the development of the school project, wherever and whenever they wanted to. Even though children seemed to be inspired by the invitation to use the provided video cameras, as soon as they had the possibility to use and experiment autonomously with them, they asked for more concrete task descriptions from the teacher, who then suggested they interview each other about the project experiences. While the objective of the two research projects differ, both involved the children in the data-collection process through Kodak Zi8 cameras, which allow for easy digital recording and still photography. This decision was grounded in both cases by a desire for a dialogic approach to the research process, in a Bakthinian perspective (in Holquist, 1981), that is, with the intention to include the children in the specifics of the research and to empower them as social actors within the institution. This happened on different levels: Project B sought to enhance the children’s role in the construction and documentation of a school project to transcend the classroom and the school as institution. Project A focused on providing resources to support children’s documentation of their perspectives and investigations in open-ended science investigations at the early primary level. In the process of video recording, children can draw on a diversity of resources as mediational, semiotic tools. They include their body language, gestures, mimicry, movements, gazes, and body positions, and they choose and adapt them spontaneously and flexibly to the communicative needs and objectives they have in each specific moment and situation of interaction. There are times when the children draw upon different languages as resources within interactions. For example, the documentation of the science activities deconstructs the borders between the “observer” and the “observed.” Some children use the video camera as an extension of their body, allowing them to have a closer look, like through a magnify-

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ing lens as they record their classmates’ science investigations. Others take active part in the investigations and recordings while holding the camera in one hand and using the other hand to participate in science activities. This “multivoicedness” of their interactions allows them to display and reconcile a diversity of heterogeneous roles. Instead of considering observation as a “method,” it turns into “a context for interaction among those involved in the research collaboration” (Angrosino & Mays de Pérez, 2003, p. 111), and this changes the traditionally, rather passive role of the research subjects in ethnographic studies to being focused on critical dialogic encounters and participatory methods. Overarching Approaches The participatory data collection in Project A and Project B were done independently of each other and were negotiated differently in the two projects. Thus, the reactions of the children, their ways of participation, as well as the audio-visual products were different. However, recently we have engaged in ongoing analytic conversations to arrive at understandings of the implications of the individual ethnographies and to find commonalities (and differences) between the two studies. We both utilize ethnography as a methodological approach to support us in “knitting together the threads of evidence” (Brooker, 2002, p. 84). In doing so, we have drawn on visual methods of children’s representations (e.g., Ewald & Lightfoot, 2001) as one level of representation in both studies. We combine the video recordings taken by the children with multiple layers of narratives, including additional recordings by stationary cameras, semistructured interviews with the children, children’s written and drawn representations of their school projects, and our own field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995). Utilizing critical approaches to the ethnographies (Carspecken, 1996) enables us to focus on issues of power as we document experiences in classrooms. We see that a focus on power is particularly important for work with young children, who are often powerless in decision-making processes, in particular in schools and other institutional structures (Thomson & Gunter, 2007). In this chapter, we present a secondary analysis of the video data the children collected in order to consider ways in which children document their experiences in schools and draw methodological implications for children’s collaborative involvement in the research process. Drawing on the methods of visual ethnography (Pink, 2007) and videography (Dinkelaker & Herrle, 2009) for data analysis, we herein focus on the joint construction of the dimensions of space, time, body, activity, and language that are observable in the recorded interactions. In the tradition of hermeneutics, the ethnographically experienced social reality is read as a culturally and

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historically situated text, with the aim of approaching the subjective insiders’ point of view. Additionally, we are interested “in the happening of the actual performance, the corporal staging and the creative and productive constitution of reality” (Wulf & Zirfas, 2007; our translation). We frame the description of the ongoing action not only as a representation, but also as a situated presentation. We consider it not only as a moment of reproduction of cultural and historical modes, but also as situated constitution in the frame of the co-designed research process. Through our collaborative interpretation of the two datasets, we became acutely aware of issues that surface when navigating the institutionalized context in schools, which are important considerations in research projects that seek participatory processes and products. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we elaborate on three episodes from the two studies to show evidence of the gradually institutionalized ways in which these children perceived their roles in the research process. We do this to illustrate patterns that we found across our datasets. More importantly, we do this to raise questions about ways we can work with children in institutionally situated research projects. The analyses of both our research projects pointed to the importance of the opportunities for open-ended discussions around classroom projects provided through participatory approaches. However, they also both highlighted the intertwining of children’s and institution’s voices as represented in the data, and the constraints of institutional structures on participatory research projects. In the remaining sections, we elaborate these interpretations through three contrasting episodes to emphasize central methodological considerations in this type of research with school-aged children. The Opportunities for Open-Ended Discussions Around Classroom Projects One of the themes that cut across our two datasets is that the use of video cameras for documentation provided children with the opportunity to author data and mediated possibilities for open-ended discussions around classroom projects. In this section, we illustrate this by sharing a vignette typical of the data collected in Project A, which took place in kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms. To illustrate the opportunities for open-ended discussions provided by positioning children as key participants in the research process, we focus specifically on children as they discuss with each other the investigations they have participated in. In the episode that follows, the teachers suggested that children have a discussion about the things they thought were interesting in the unit on water. To that end, in this first episode (vignette 1) three children are in a hallway outside of the

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classroom discussing an experiment they had previously participated in, in which they had tested a variety of objects to see which sank or floated. As the episode begins, one of the researchers explains to the children, “You can talk about what you have found out, and when you are finished, you push this red button,” and Jill responds with “Okay” as the researcher walks away from the group. As the children begin to discuss which items went under and which stayed on top of the water, Ann uses the video camera to record her two classmates, Jill and Pit. Ann is also active in the conversation as she whispers ideas to them and directs their movements, which keeps them in the viewfinder of the camera. After a short introductory discussion about what items sank, Ann asks, “What else went under?” Jill is very expressive in her retelling as she shouts, “The heart!” She smiles widely and draws a heart shape in the air with her hands while lifting her hands in the air and saying, “The heart was on the top!” As this exchange continues, the girls collaboratively construct a retelling of the items that sank and floated, while one is in front of the camera and one is behind the camera. What had actually happened in the experiment is that the children had taken a cut-out foil heart (that floated) and clipped it to a clothespin so that it sank. Only when this heart/clothespin came apart did the heart float again. Ann replies to Jill’s comment about the heart being on top of the water by using her position as recorder to insert suggestions into Jill’s retelling, as she whispers, “A clothespin, a clothespin” to remind Jill that the heart had been attached to a clothespin. Jill corrects her retelling of the heart floating by saying that “A clothespin . . . the heart and the clothespin was broken,” and Ann as asks, “Did it break under the water?” Jill replies with “Yes, and after that the heart floated.” Providing children with access to technology for recording their experiences (via video, audio, or still photography) has mediated opportunities for children to discuss with each other their investigations, wonderings, and discoveries. In this instance, because the girls had shared the classroom investigation, they are able to construct a retelling of the investigation that not only simply lists what sank and what floated, but rather emphasizes this complex interaction between the initial sinking of the heart and then the floating. As Ann (the recorder) is a member of the class and as such, participated in the investigations, she is able to not only record Jill’s retelling, but also participate in the retelling in a way that leads to a joint reconstruction of the event. There is no adult present in the interaction, and the interaction is filled with multimodal dialogue, as seen through Jill’s very expressive, physical retelling of the investigation. When the children record themselves, they are animated, active, and often include their investigations that were not part of the intended lesson. In this episode, for example, the children were discussing this heart/clothespin investigation. The teacher had asked the children to see which sank and which floated, but had not

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discussed finding ways to manipulate the items so that floating items could sink and vice versa. However, these are precisely the investigations that the children chose to discuss and record. We have noticed that the video cameras provided the opportunity for children to engage in open-ended discussions about their investigations and to co-construct retellings that are creative and narrative. Not only were these discussions open-ended, but they revealed perspectives that were not evident from the viewpoint of the teachers or the researchers. Providing the children with cameras was meant as a way for the researchers to engage in interpretive research that was guided by the children’s documentation and data collection. Young children are often “invisible” in research projects (Kellett, 2010) and lack power over the direction of research, even if it is conducted in educational settings and focuses on children’s experiences. It is with this focus on visibility as well as the recognition (and celebration) of different perspectives and experiences that are central to these particular studies. Children’s Productions as Institutional Realities The resources children draw on in order to co-design the social reality of the research process are intertwined with institutionally promoted tools and voices. The same is true for the roles they construct through the use of different resources. The participatory educational ethnography and the analysis of the resources children draw on also allow us to analyze the interactions between the children’s and the adult’s (institutional) voice. We return briefly to vignette 1 as an example of this. As the children are actively moving and talking in the corridor, there is a sudden appearance of the teacher. While she is only visible at the back of the corridor, Ann suddenly holds the camera still and says “Stop that. Don’t do such silly things.” This appearance of the teacher provokes a change in the performative design of the researching activity between Jill and Pit. The children seem to expect adults to criticize active and emotionally charged body movements, as their dancing, jumping around, and big gesturing as well as their physical interactions suddenly stop when an adult appears. The presence of adults also seems to provoke the boundary making between an institutionally legitimated, visible space and a secret space in which children help each other out (whispering), create complicity (astute eye contact between the girls when they notice the teacher’s presence), and negotiate institutional discourses (Maybin, 2006). This example also demonstrates the roles that children reconstruct when being reminded of the institutional embeddedness of their interactions: The roles of teachers and pupils merge in the girl’s abovementioned representation of the institution’s disciplinary inter-

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vention, but create social boundaries and asymmetries between different groups. Even though children are able to negotiate between the voices and resources they spontaneously choose, adapt, and transform, their exposure to institutional control seems to exercise a homogenizing pressure . The distinction between the video that is recorded when adults are present versus when there are only children present is an important one. The data collected in Project B provides evidence with regard to the success of children’s institutionalization into schooling. One year before passing the final exams that decide which secondary schools children can attend (thus, in essence, decide the children’s professional future), children act, above all, as passive executers of a task they themselves asked for. The data children collected is strikingly homogeneous, and even though children seemed to be very enthusiastic about using the cameras, they did not use them a lot: Among the 31 video and 15 audio recordings, only 5 do not reproduce an interview structure. We would like to present a group of three very similar recordings as an example. Each recording takes between 12 and 26 seconds, and the siblings Irina and Yon are the recorders. There is a strict role distribution: Yon asks the questions and Irina answers. Interestingly, the children repeat almost the same interview three times, but with an increasing amount of questions. Three of the questions appear three times, as Table 7.1 demonstrates. The questions are mainly closed and lead to a mere affirmation (c/d: “yes,” a: “good”) by the interviewee; even in the case of a more opened question, the interviewee avoids getting more personally implicated (b: “It’s interesting”). Both participants contribute to the creation of an asymmetric conversational structure. The answers to the repeated questions remain the same in the first two interviews, but in the third interview, the Table 7.1  Interview Structure Interview: 1st version a. How do you like the project? b. What do you like within the project? c. Are you glad that we organize a school meeting?

Interview: 2nd version a. How do you like the project? c. Are you glad that we organize a school meeting? b. What do you like within the project? d. Are you glad that we are a UNESCO school?

Interview: 3rd version a. How do you like the project? b. What do you like within the project? e. Do you think we can achieve something with the project? d. Are you glad that we are a UNESCO school? c. Are you glad that we organize a school meeting?

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interviewee makes an effort to articulate the same answers in whole sentences. She therefore takes over the exact wording of the question so that the interview resembles a grammar exercise, like in the following example: “Are you glad that we organize a school meeting?”—“Yes, I am glad that we organize a school meeting.” Only the open question (e) seems to challenge the interviewee. It asks for a more detailed reflection, but Irina eludes the question by answering shortly, “I don’t know.” This example depicts some typical features of the recordings by the children from the 5th grade. The institution appears in all the dimension of the data: space, time, persons, body movement, camera perspective, and interactions. Although the children explicitly have been given the power to negotiate the space of their video recordings, the act of recording almost exclusively happens at school—within the classroom (8 recordings) or on the school’s playground (15 recordings) or at least during the time children are at school (3 more interviews). Interestingly, the three recordings presented above took place after school (out of a total of 5 recordings), as indicated by the time and the date of the video file. The fact that children recorded outside school, however, does not question at all the dominance of the institutional voice that seems to be typecast in these videos. With regard to the characteristics of interaction, the abovementioned example of conversations between Irina and Yon is rather representative. Children almost exclusively reproduce the institutionally promoted question-answer structure with an average of three to four questions per interview, and most of these questions are inspired by the ideas the teacher and the researcher mentioned as examples on demand. Most of the recordings are of a very short duration of less than one minute. Children mainly ask for the point of view of the interviewees and mostly ask closed questions. The answers, thus, are very short, in some of the cases even monosyllabic or just a repeat of the words of the questions and do not tell anything about the children’s perspective, their arguments, or preferences. The striking homogeneity of the data in Project B, as opposed to the multidimensional exercise of agency as recorded by the children in Project A, who are at the beginning of their schooling, points to a reduction of diversity through socialization. Children learn to reproduce institutionally imposed borders of space and time, of social group, the interaction structures as suggested by the teacher on demand, and even the linguistic choices the institution predefines. They learn to display a completely conformed institutionalized identity, even in spaces that would be built on their co-construction; and they learned to perfectly hide possible other, more dialogic identity constructions in an institutional setting (“frontstage”; Goffman, 1971). This might be due to a lack of time to be creative within the tight organization because they have to prepare for the final exams, or to a distrust with regard to the disciplinary structures of the institution.

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Children’s recordings in both projects also point to the limitations of their participation possibilities in an institutionally promoted learner or pupil role. We can observe that this role makes children dependent on the institution’s explicit role and task descriptions and leads to a homogenization of children’s creativity. To further illustrate this claim and provide an example of the institutional structures that are evident in the interactions, we next present an episode from Project A (vignette 2) in which we see institutionally bounded and defined roles emerging among children. As a part of the unit on water, the teacher arranged a collaboration with a class of older children from the fifth grade in the same school. The fifth graders joined the 1st-grade class for several water-related science investigations, including exploring sinking and floating, surface tension, and buoyancy of materials. These activities took place over multiple days, and afterwards the children were instructed by the teachers to use video cameras to document their thoughts on what they learned and did together. Across each of the groups, the videos indicate that the older children use the camera to reproduce institutional structures and a question-and-answer format. Vignette 2 begins with three younger children sitting side by side on the floor in a hallway, Paul, Thomas, and Jill (who is also in vignette 1). While there are no older children visible, it is clear from the voices that there are three different older children on the other side of the camera. “OK. Have you paid attention Jill?” says Carlo, a fifth grader who is holding the video camera. Jill looks at him as he asks, “Why does the blue circle float?” She rocks back and forth and looks at her two classmates, as she very hesitantly says, “Uhh, because, because it isn’t that heavy?” As she trails off, Paul says, “No Jill, it’s because it’s round.” “Quiet!” Carlo firmly says to Paul, and he says to Jill, “What were you saying?” As Jill begins to continue to answer “It is lighter,” there is a knock on the door behind them, and Paul jumps up to get to the door. “Stay here!” shouts Carlo, and Paul quickly comes back to his spot, although the knocking continues. A second older boy, Mateo, asks Jill for clarification. “Light in the color or the weight?” as Carlo says to Paul “I’m going to tell your teacher,” apparently referring to the fact that Paul had stood up to open the door. “Light in weight,” says Jill very softly, and Mateo says, “That is right.” This group discussion continues for several minutes, with the older children not permitting multiple speakers at once (“Stay quiet” and “One at a time” are heard multiple times). There is a striking contrast between this vignette the first vignette, in which the first graders are alone while retelling. In vignette 1, there is significant physical activity, with the children walking, jumping, skipping, and using their arms to make sweeping gestures in their retelling of the heart that sank and then floated. Both children in the vignette look directly into the camera and have wide smiles and very expressive facial features. We observe a distinct

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difference in interaction when the 1st-grade children engage in joint discussions with the older children. The older children take over a dominant role in the interactions with younger children and seem to reproduce a teacher’s role. The co-constructed aim of the recorded interaction seems to be to evaluate the knowledge of the group participants and to respond to an evaluation or to educate the target audience of the video. The younger children take over a passive role when interacting with the older children. The older children behave in a disciplined way, using the camera as a tool for documentation, not for taking a performative part in the co-construction of the reality. Interactions are designed as interview-like questions and answers, with a clear role differentiation between those who take over the role of interviewers and interviewees. Disciplinary mechanisms also are reproduced. The older children tend to order and to evaluate the younger children. Consequently, the younger children, in the joint interactions, also behave in a more disciplined way, they look timidly to the older children and their voices are soft and their answers to questions are apprehensive. The data of both research projects demonstrate that children are learning to perform the role the institution expects. However, we observe a difference in the data with regard to the possibilities of dialogue between children’s diverse voices and the institutionally promoted voices. In comparison to the more dialogic intertwining of voices and realities in the younger children’s data in Project A as illustrated in vignette 1, the second vignette as well as the recordings of the fifth graders in Project B seem to demonstrate a rigidification of the boundaries between institutional and noninstitutional practices and spaces. Multivoiced Ethnography: Possibilities for Research with Primary Children The participatory approach to data collection of both studies gave insight into the experiences children chose to retell as central to their perspectives. It can serve to highlight the complex ways that children interpret the world, as the data reveal interesting and unexpected events that the children discussed (for example, vignette 1 and the heart/clothespin experience). At the elementary level in particular, participatory approaches provide a lens into children’s multiple voices and mediational tools, their perspectives and reality re-/co-/constructions. Such approaches can also provide an insight into the intertwining of different voices and into the power relationships within school and depict the way institutional disciplining functions and its restrictive effects on children’s participation possibilities. We learn about the limited and closed pupil and learner role the school promotes and

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children’s capabilities to perform this role when feeling exposed to institutional control. We also learn about children’s capability to perform, reconcile, and counteract between different and even mutually exclusive roles. Consequently, we also learn about possibilities of the enrichment of institutional discourses through children’s active participation in their constitution at a younger age and the constraining institutional mechanisms. We also observe the institution’s refusal to take part in a symmetric dialogue—a dimension that becomes more visible through the contrastive analysis of data collected at different ages—and the institution’s provocation of rigid symbolic boundaries between children’s and institution’s voices. While we have chosen several examples to illustrate the themes we found across the datasets, we do consider this experience of participating as agents in the process of research had the potential to be empowering to the children. Even the fifth graders commented in a written project evaluation that they particularly liked co-constructing the research process. Children’s comments throughout reflected their opinions on the designed participatory process: Chloe, Lilly, and Isabelle felt they were influencing the project; Yon and Michel appreciated the possibility of collaboration and getting to know their classmates better; Armin felt more integrated in the classroom through the group work: Lilly and Isabelle expressed experiencing the classroom as a society or a community and thought that there were fewer conflicts within the classroom during project activities; Kathrin mentioned that the project appeared like a leisure activity to her. The participatory research process can mediate institutional transformations; however, we see that as the children progress through schooling, they tend to discipline themselves and to reproduce the institution’s voice even in protected project activities. The data we analyzed in this chapter points to the conditions, challenges, and opportunities of participatory research within educational institutions. It leads us to argue that to truly engage in participatory research with young children, we need to have the institutional structures that provide support (in the area of time) to engaging in analytic and interpretive discussions with the children. The primary intention of this chapter is to approach the questions of authoring and “multivoicedness” of research, in particular in working with children in schools. In approaching data gathering through polyvocal lenses, a goal is to work toward highlighting differences and multiple perspectives. Such polysemicity is not necessarily inherent in institutionally framed classroom interactions between children and adults, and herein we hope to have contextualized both this inherent challenge as well as the possibilities of such work with primary-school-aged children. We incorporated empirical data to ground our theoretical discussions and methodological considerations, and the data gives insights into the appropriateness of this kind

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of ethnographic approach for educational research and into the remaining methodological challenges. How Can We Fully Embrace the Role of Children’s Voices in Research? An important consideration in working toward multivoicedness in research is the aim to provide an opportunity for children’s voices to be “heard” and also to be acted upon. In other words, we believe that data collection alone is not enough. Rather, the data needs to be acted upon so that the children recognize that their perspectives are heard, considered, and utilized. In fact, Lundy (2007) has conceptualized children’s “voice” as consisting of four distinct components: Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence: Space: Children must be given the opportunity to express a view; Voice: Children must be facilitated to express their views; Audience: The view must be listened to; Influence: The view must be acted upon, as appropriate. (p. 933) Both Projects A and B succeeded in providing children with a space to express their views. However, this was possible in only one of the contexts with the younger children (Project A). Apparently, much more active intervention would have been necessary on the part of the researchers and institutional representatives to facilitate children to express their views, at least at a later age (Project B). For the research process to develop in the sense of a multivoiced ethnography, the disciplinary mechanisms of the institution have to be actively acted upon and turned into facilitating opportunities for children to take part. We suggest that researchers have to take into account the history of disciplination that is archived in the social relationship between children and institution when planning research and evaluating possibilities of dialogic/democratic change from within the institution (Siry, 2010). For this purpose, a close collaboration between the institution and the researchers is necessary, one that also includes discussion spaces in which the collected data are dealt with. The possibility of taking part in the interpretation of the data is a very important condition for giving children an idea of their possibilities of participation in the construction of the research process and building the framing of the research process on their expertise. Embracing this possibility would not only provide them with an audience that gives their voice a certain sense but also empower them to decide themselves on the institutional intervention they need to become facilitated for their participation. They can bring in their insider perspective in the research process and take over a research perspective toward their life worlds, which may facilitate

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their contribution to transformations of their social reality (see Thomson & Gunter, 2007, p. 330f). In both research contexts this chapter refers to, there was no possibility to open up sustainable spaces of data discussion. The institutional time constraints were restrictive, and it was difficult to establish a dialogue both with the teachers and with the children on the data they collected after the fact. There was not the possibility to reconnect with the children after the data-collection process was completed in order to discuss their ideas on the data they had collected. Dialogic reflection on and exploitation of these data as children’s statements was not enhanced. Once the project activities where “done,” from the teachers’ perspectives, the study needed to stop, as the teachers felt pressure to continue on with their normal classroom routines and activities. We could argue that the dialogue between research and institution ended when the research process tended to contradict the institutionally promoted role of pupils and learners; whereas, the co-designed research process empowered children by considering them as experts and provided them with an influential role as co-constructors of social realities. With regard to the Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, the data shows that participatory processes of data collection alone do not guarantee a multivoiced ethnography that would guarantee children’s empowerment. Rather, we argue that if educational ethnographic research takes seriously the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, it does not have to build on children’s voices only. It also has to actively act upon the institutional structures that co-construct children’s voices within the institution. This implies that ethnographic educational research that is committed to the UN convention, to a certain extent, also has to change the institutional structures in order to actively work toward dialogic interactions between institutional and children’s voices. Participatory research committed to a certain polysemicity as suggested by the UN Convention is possible, although a level of intervention of the researchers with regard to the institution is necessary for creating a frame within which it can happen. We therefore suggest that multivoiced educational ethnography is not only a methodology, rather, multivoiced educational ethnography is a methodology that represents a political/ideological stance, and as such, we must assure that the entire research context allows for multivoicedness and polysemicity. Notes 1. CODI-SCILE-A (2008–2011) Project: Competences for Organizing DiscourseIn-Interaction & Science Learning: Analyzing Knowledge Building as Activity of Collaborative Inquiring. (blog http://dica-lab.org/codiscilea/project/ ) PI: Dr. Charles Max. Uni. Luxembourg.

144    C. SIRY and C. MICK 1. FNR (National Research Fund of Luxembourg) financed CORE project “ProDIC, C09/ID/05.

References Angrosino, M. V., & Mays de Pérez, K. A. (2003). Rethinking observation. From method to context. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 107–154). Thousand Oaks, CA; London, UK; New Delhi, India: Sage. Brooker, L. (2002). Starting school—Young children learning cultures. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Carspecken, F. P. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. New York, NY: Routledge. Dinkelaker, J., & Herrle, M. (2009). Erziehungswissenschaftliche videographie. Eine einführung. Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Einarsdóttir, J. (2007). Research with children: Methodological and ethical challenges. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(2), 197–211. Eisenhart, M. (2001). Educational ethnography past, present, and future: Ideas to think with. Educational Researcher, 30(8), 16–27. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. (1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ewald, W., & Lightfoot, A. (2001). I wanna take me a picture: Teaching photography and writing to children. Boston, MA: Beacon. Goffman, E. (1971). The presentation of self in everyday life. London, UK: Penguin. Gutiérrez, K. D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148–164. Holquist, M. (Ed.). (1981). The dialogic imagination. Five essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kellett, M. (2010). Small shoes, big steps! Empowering children as researchers. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46, 195–203. Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lundy, L. (2007). “Voice” is not enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. British Educational Research Journal, 33(6), 927–942. Maybin, J. (2006). Children’s voices. Talk, knowledge and identity. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. London, UK: Sage. Siry, C. (2010). Envisioning polysemicity: Generating insights into the complexity of place-based research within contested spaces. In D. J. Tippins, M. P. Mueller, M. van Eijck, & J. D. Adams (Eds.), Cultural studies and environmentalism (pp. 315–321). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Thomson, P., & Gunter, H. (2007). The methodology of students-as-researchers: Valuing and using experience and expertise to develop methods. Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education, 28(3), 327–342.

Multivoiced Research With Children    145 Yurén, T. (2008). Dispositivos de formación sociomoral, mecanismos de exclusión y fugas autoformativas. In T. Yurén & C. Romero (Eds.), La formación de los jóvenes en México. Dentro y fuera de los límites de la escuela (pp. 25–48). Mexico: Casa Juan Pablos. Watson-Gegeo, K. (1997). Classroom ethnography. In N. H. Hornberger & D. Corson, Encyclopedia of language and education (pp. 135–144). Dordrecht, The Netherlands; Boston, MA; London, UK: Kluwer Academic. Wulf, C., & Zirfas, J. (2007). Pädagogik des performativen. Theorien, methoden, perspektiven. Weinheim, Germany; Basel, Switzerland: Beltz Verlag.

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Chapter 8

“Talk to Students About What’s Really Going On” Researching the Experiences of Marginalized Youth Carl E. James Leanne Taylor

Abstract In this chapter, we report on a qualitative research project on which we worked closely with members of a youth-run community organization to explore racialized and marginalized youths’ experiences with and perceptions of school discipline, police, and the legal/justice system. Data came from individual interviews, focus groups, as well as rap and hip hop workshops. Utilizing critical theories, we discuss the challenges of conducting respectful research with marginalized youth and our experiences and efforts to conduct research that moves beyond merely having youth tell their stories to having them work with the research team in ways that enable them to develop useful skills and learn about their legal rights and responsibilities. In our efforts to engage in culturally responsive and relevant research practices, we sought to build trust, honor community, and support the youth through collabora-

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 147–167 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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148    C. E. JAMES and L. TAYLOR tion and reciprocity. We argue that understanding and supporting racialized “at-risk” youth requires that we also question and modify our methodologies to consider a range of approaches that are not only relevant and familiar to researchers, but also relevant and responsive to respondents and their community’s cultural, social, educational, and political needs and concerns.

In this chapter, we discuss our experiences with conducting respectful research that moves beyond merely having youth tell their stories to them working with the research team in ways that enable them to develop relevant skills and learn about their rights and responsibilities. We draw on a qualitative research project in which we explored the effects that the disciplinary policies and practices of schools and encounters with the justice system (i.e., police, lawyers, and judges) have had on the schooling and educational outcomes of marginalized young people. The research project was carried out during a time when schools in Ontario, Canada, were implementing government legislated “zero tolerance” policies in an attempt to address increases in behavior problems such as truancy and violence.1 The strict disciplinary policies and practices that were instituted included deploying police in schools and referring more incidents to police. These changes subjected particularly disadvantaged Black and other racialized youth to disproportionate rates of expulsion and suspension from school (Daniel & Bondy, 2008) creating a “debilitating environment for youth” (Porfilio & Carr, 2010, p. 5), particularly for those who are racialized and low income. It is within this context that our research team of faculty members and graduate students from the university’s Faculties of Law and Education joined with lawyers from the on-campus Community and Legal Aid Services Program (CLASP) and a neighborhood youth-run not-for-profit organization, Friends in Trouble (FIT) to investigate marginalized youth’s experiences with school discipline and with the justice system. An initiative of the Faculty of Law, the research project, entitled Youth in Focus, Friends in Trouble: Access to Justice for “Marginalized” and Low Income Youth, sought to, as stated in the Human Participants Review Protocol Form, Engage youth not only in describing and discussing their experiences but also in the forward-looking task of re-conceptualizing “access to justice” in ways that meaningfully capture their needs and concerns. Beyond seeking to create venues for youth to tell their stories and offer their perspectives on “access to justice,” the project seeks to educate and empower youth through the incorporation of public legal information and through the creation of opportunities within the research project for youth to acquire and enhance their own skills. (p. 4)

Building on critical theories, which highlight the contested spaces in which we live and the broader structures informing them, we discuss our

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research process and outcomes. In keeping with these perspectives, we represent how the significance of community, collaboration, and reciprocity, as well as the use of flexible, creative, and nontraditional data-collection methods helped to make research meaningful for youth in ways that allowed for deeper insights into the complex experiences, needs, and challenges they faced. By offering an account of our experiences and learning through the research process, we critically explore our attempts to conduct research differently and create space for youth to tell their stories in their own words and in ways that were not, as the youth would say, “phony.” Theoretical Considerations Critical theories enable us to imagine new possibilities in research while giving attention to the systemic issues that structure the lives of individuals. Such theories work from the premise that claims of fairness, meritocracy, equal opportunity, democracy, neutrality, color-blindness, and multiculturalism must be interrogated and placed in historical and social context while acknowledging the heterogeneity of groups. As such, the social, educational, and legal situations in which individuals find themselves are not simply a result of racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, or other differences, but are a consequence of social inequities that are structured and sustained through classism, racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy that are inherent in society. Critical theorists (Hinchey, 2008; Howard, 2008; Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005; Porfilio & Malott, 2011) make central the reality that we live in an inequitable society in which institutions are sites of power with which individuals struggle in their bid to counter their exclusion, oppression, and marginalization, all of which contribute to their silence and disengagement from the institutions and society in general. Critical race theory (CRT) focuses on the process of racialization, holding that race (a sociohistorical construct) and racism are deeply embedded in societal structures, thereby affecting the social constructions and positioning of individuals. Hence, race and its intersecting relationship with class, gender, age, sexuality, immigrant status, geography, and other factors inform the ways in which individuals are framed and how racial and social identities and meanings are produced (Mitchell, Wood, & Witherspoon, 2010; Yosso, 2005). As Zamudio, Russell, Rios, and Bridgeman (2011) write, “Critical race theory focuses on the all-encompassing web of race to further our understanding of inequality” (p. 3), particularly in our contemporary context, in which racism takes “an inconspicuous, even covert approach to the issues of inequity” (James, 2012b, p. 81). Gordon and Klug (1986) define this “new racism” as a “a cluster of beliefs which holds that it is natural for people who share a way of life, a culture, to bond together in a group

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and to be antagonistic towards outsiders who are different and who are seen to threaten their identity as a group” (p. 22). In terms of examining the lived experiences of youth, critical youth studies insists that we “capture the mosaic of experiences and textured realities of young people’s lives” as opposed to representing them as having static lives and distorted behaviors (Ginwright, 2008, p. 14). Moreover, CRT, as Cammarota and Fine (2008) write, “goes beyond the traditional pathological or patronizing view by asserting that young people have the capacity and agency to analyze their social context, to engage critical research collectively, and to challenge and resist the forces impeding their possibilities for liberation” (p. 4). The authors further point out that critical youth studies move from an essentialized representation of youth to acknowledge the “transformational resistance” in which youth engage “through formal processes in ‘real’ settings, through multigenerational collectives and sometimes among youth alone” (p. 4). And as Dimitriadis (2008) writes, youth are not to be treated “as a pathological problem to be managed,” nor “incipient radicals, ‘resisting’ dominant culture through everyday cultural practices,” but as “partners in struggle, as a resource to be drawn upon in common cause” (p. viii). Any study of the lived experiences of individuals or communities needs to take into account how geography operates in their lives; for whatever the space, it is not neutral. In fact, physical, social and cultural spaces function to produce and reproduce structures and practices of domination and inequity. Accordingly, such spaces inform the meanings, identities, and reputation of communities, as well as the sense of belonging that residents develop toward the community (Delaney, 2002; Mitchell et al., 2010). The marginalization, racialization, and stigmatization of communities emerge from the various policies and practices of institutions such as schools, police, and social service agencies that operate in and outside of the communities. Critical researchers maintain that research about youth, or “with” youth, as Dimitriadis (2008) writes, should not be to categorize, stereotype, essentialize, pathologize or affirm their “at-risk” label as defined by adults. Rather, research should critically investigate their lives, their understandings of societal opportunity structures (in relation to, for example, education, justice, recreations, and work), and how class, race, gender, and space technologies operate in their daily navigation and negotiation of these opportunity structures (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Dimitriadis, 2008; James, in press). Further, research with marginalized youth can help them speak to the “tragedies of injustice” while helping them to appreciate “the tools of social science research in ways that suit their needs” (Morrell, 2008, p. 161). It sees research as more than a passive accumulation of facts and data and appreciates the capacity for “research findings [to] become launching pads

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for ideas, actions, plans, and strategies to initiate social change” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008, p. 6). Conducting research through a critical paradigm also requires not only attention to the power relationship between researcher and participants, but also how the identities—in relation to class, race, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and such—of researchers and participants influence the interactions in the recruitment process, the interview situation, and other methods of data collection. Referring to race and concomitantly racism, Twine (2000) indicates that “racism can have methodological consequences for qualitative researchers even when their research is not primarily focused on the issues of race or racism” (p. 27). Yet, as researchers and participants share the same identity, for example, race, or as Islam (2000) terms it, “assumed, shared racism” (p. 47), there are still differences to be negotiated between the perceived “racial insider” and research participants. And even as researchers take an antiracism approach to their work with participants, it is possible that they could find themselves positioned by research participants “as ‘traitors’ to their communities on account of their research” (Twine, 2000, p. 27). The point to be considered here is the complexity of the identities, relationships, and interactions of researchers and participants, and the constant negotiation that must take place if the research is supposed to be responsive to the needs, interests, and expectations of all concerned. Our Research Project: “Youth in Focus, Friends in Trouble” Our research team included faculty members and graduate students from the Faculties of Law and Education, lawyers from CLASP (Community and Legal Aid Services Program) and two representatives of FIT (Friends in Trouble). Several youth from FIT participated in research meetings and worked as research assistants on the project. The principal investigator, who also initiated the research, was a law professor. Carl, professor in the Faculty of Education, was one of three co-investigators (the others were from the Faculty of Law). An African Canadian, Carl has conducted research on issues of racialization, marginalization, and access to education. Leanne, now an assistant professor in an Ontario Faculty of Education, was at the time a research assistant on the project. Her areas of research include issues of educational equity, racialization, and multiracial identities in Canada. We have worked together on a number of other research projects including a longitudinal study of the experiences of marginalized students in university (James & Taylor, 2008).

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The research team, including representatives of FIT, came together to discuss the project proposal before submitting it for funding. This was to ensure that we would undertake a program of research that was meaningful and relevant to the youth, as well as gain their trust and confidence to participate. Given the nature of the issues we were exploring, we were conscious of the youth’s vulnerability and their possible sense of mistrust shaped by their encounters with teachers, school administrators, police officers, judges, and other court officials. For this reason, we gave attention to the fact that the participants who were between the ages of 18 and 25 resided in a neighborhood (which bordered the university) that was popularly described as a “troubled” or “inner city” neighborhood. It is a community populated by racialized and low income people, many of them fairly recent immigrants and refugees. Stigmatized as a “hot spot” of social problems related to gang violence and criminal activities, it is a neighborhood where police surveillance is seen as both a preemptive measure and a source of containment. As a consequence, the young people are disproportionately harassed, searched, and arrested by police—all part of a criminalization process (James, 2012a). And high rates of low educational performance, truancy, and school drop-out among the students in the area schools contributed to their at-risk construction and the presence of police officers in the local community high schools. As our research progressed, we followed the youth’s friendships and social networks with peers from other similar communities in Toronto, and as such interviewed a few youth from these other communities. The research participants were youth who had encounters with police and the legal system (i.e., through the courts), with much of these encounters starting with incidents at their high schools. Specifically, we recruited youth who had personal experience with disciplinary action in schools, had direct knowledge of (or witnessed) action taken against someone she/he knew well, and/or had a sense of the Safe Schools policies and practices and their impact on youth in their community. Participants were invited to talk with us about their observations and ideas about disciplinary practices in schools, the growing trend of school administrators contacting police, and the presence of police in schools. Basically, we wanted to hear what these participating youth had to say about access to justice and what it would take to make access to justice more of a reality for them. We structured our research in ways that took these experiences, concerns, contexts, and key players into account. In this regard, the research questions, methodology, and recruiting measures were all discussed and agreed upon by the Advisory Committee, which included members of the research team, the coordinator (a lawyer) of CLASP, the executive director, and other youth representatives of FIT. Recognizing that many youth do not necessarily respond to traditional research methods and that they

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may have held a level of suspicion toward researchers from “outside,” we used various research methods for data collection. For example, in addition to individual interviews and focus groups, we included rap/hip hop workshops as part of our data-gathering process. The participation of the Executive Director of FIT, Jamal Clarke, was invaluable to the research process. At 22 years old, he had much of the experiences and insights that contributed significantly to the initial and ongoing research planning. For example, he and other staff members of FIT offered the team useful perspectives on the youth’s interests and shared with us many of their concerns and experiences in the community. Jamal also provided feedback on our methodology, and with another member of the research team (who was a recent law school graduate and rapper), introduced the idea of using rap/hip hop workshops as a culturally relevant and meaningful method of data collection. He was also instrumental in putting us in contact with different youth from the community to participate in the workshops, focus groups, and interviews. The Advisory Committee sought to further involve youth in the design and implementation of the project. Their involvement as co-facilitators was instructive; for as Morrell (2008) writes, “Positioning youth as researchers offers important and unique insights into some of our most serious social ills that disproportionally affect young people: ills such as gang violence, suicide, and educational injustice” (p. 158). Building on this idea, several youth were trained as co-facilitators to help with focus groups and rap workshops. These youth were paid an honorarium for their assistance as facilitators and with a variety of other tasks including meeting with members of the Research Team to plan and prepare for the workshop, helping the research team recruit and follow up with youth for focus groups and interviews; facilitating full-day workshop(s), debriefing with members of the research team following the workshop, and assisting with the recording session following the rap workshop. One of Jamal’s contentions was that there needed to be other tangible incentives apart from the financial support for the youth. For example, he requested that we provide culturally appropriate food (instead of pizza) at research meetings (which he and co-facilitators attended) as well as at the focus group and workshop sessions. We also provided the youth who participated in the research with transportation allowance (i.e., bus fare) and childcare expenses; and those who participated in the advisory meetings and planning sessions were given honoraria for attendance. All those who participated in the rap workshops were able to create a CD, which they kept. Each of the youth we interviewed were compensated with a nominal sum of $20. We are well aware of the concerns that are often raised about compensating research participants. In fact, the university’s Board of Research Ethics

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did raise the usual ethical questions about paying participants, but eventually gave approval for us to do so.2 On this issue of compensation, Tilley and Gormley (2007) suggest that “obvious problems exist with enlisting people for research purposes by agreeing to pay them when they have little or no access to money.” The consequence in doing so, according to the authors, is that participants, especially those “desperate for funds,” may become “indebted to the researcher and works for her money” (p. 378). While the motivation of research participants “desperate for funds” might be obvious, there is no way of telling what the research implications are for those motivated otherwise. Ultimately, navigating the constraints of our institutions and the expectations of young participants are all part of a “troubled dance,” as Tilley (2008) would say, in which we must engage as critical researchers. In what follows, we discuss the ways that the decisions we made in our approach to the research allowed us to build trust, engender respect, and meet the needs of the youth from whom we wanted to hear. We share the participants telling of their stories, their understanding of and attachment to their communities, and the ways we were able to foster collaboration and reciprocity while helping to build skills, enhance their knowledge about their rights and responsibilities, and create networks and opportunities. Engaging in Culturally Responsive and Relevant Research Getting Participants’ Stories We began the data collection process with focus groups, after which we invited youth (and any friends they wished to refer to us who fit the selection criteria but who may not have been present) to participate in a one-onone interview with Leanne, someone with whom they were already familiar from the focus groups and from her visits to the FIT office. Many had also contacted Leanne by text and phone to arrange their involvement in the focus groups, something they continued to do and about which they felt comfortable when arranging the interviews. The interviews offered an excellent follow-up to the focus groups and, together, were useful approaches to conducting research with these youth.3 As Bagnoli and Clarke (2010) suggest, “A focus group can provide participants with a space in which they can define their own categories and labels, and unmask ideas and opinions through dialogue and debate with others” (p. 104). These exchanges among participants, rather than those between participant and researcher, generate and enhance data as participants are able to question each other, follow up on comments, and provide further explanation. This is particularly evident in cases in which participants are familiar with each other and/or share

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knowledge of the social and physical environment under investigation. For example, in our focus groups, youth would frequently build on each other’s comments, at times support each other, and challenge the comments or arguments advanced. Consider the following exchange: Facilitator (Leanne): What’s safety like in your school? Co-Facilitator (youth member of Research Team) (to number 3): What school do you go to? What’s safety like in your school? P. 3: [name of high school] is soft. Co-Facilitator: But in what way do you feel safe and secure? I’m sure when you go to school and put the shoes in your locker, that you feel they’ll still be there at the end of the day. P. 3: Yeah. Co-Facilitator: Are there police in your school? P. 3: They come sometimes. They only come when something is happening. Co-Facilitator: Are there any cameras? P. 3: Yeah. Facilitator: What do you think about the security in your school? P. 3: There’s a lot of security, hall monitors . . . Facilitator: Is the security in your school too much, not enough? P. 1: There are too much cameras there. P. 5: Does that matter? No. Because I bet half of those are off. Remember that time my jacket got robbed from my locker? All I needed to know was who did it. I wanted to see who took my jacket. I told the principal I don’t need to do nothing, I don’t want the cops to come. All I need to do is watch the video to see who took my jacket. P. 7: They’re lying to you. The way you’re talking. Co-Facilitator: It’s the way you said it. The principal is thinking this guy has something on his mind. P. 5: He said the camera didn’t have film in it. P. 7: I went to the principal’s office and I’ve seen every camera Understandably, although focus groups are useful and allowed for an engaging peer dialogue, they also have limitations (Bagnoli & Clark, 2010). Not all youth will wish to share their stories in this way. Thus, the rap/hip hop workshops were also used as a more creative means of engaging youth in the research process. Led by a law graduate (a rapper who was assisted by some local rap artists from the community), the workshops were held in two day-long sessions. On the first day, participants (averaging about eight in each session) created verses through which they expressed their ideas related to their experiences and observations about life and schooling in their

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communities and beyond. On the second day-long session, participants, individually or as a group, worked with equipment in a rented studio to record their lyrics on CDs, which they were able to take with them. The workshops, which were based on the recommendations of the youth representatives on the Advisory Committee and Research Team, served as both a method of data gathering4 and as a way of developing and transferring skills and knowledge to the youth (see Porfilio & Porfilio, 2010). And the contention of the youth advisors that research participants (many of them involved in FIT programs) would much more readily express their experiences, perceptions, and ideas through the medium of verse proved useful. In addition to the verses that were used as data, notes were also kept of the process. Building Trust Given the youth’s lived experiences and their understandable ambivalence toward us as research outsiders, it was important for us to negotiate and establish a level of trust and rapport with the youth. This trust was necessary if we were to sustain our interactions with them beyond their initial agreement to participate in the research process, and if we were to gain access to their stories and help create opportunities for them to build skills, establish networks, understand their rights, and access legal supports that were being made available to them. In other words, the ways we sought to build and maintain trust were part of an effort to balance our research goals with the expectations and needs of the youth. One important aspect of our trust building was to meet research participants in spaces and on terms that were most acceptable to them and use communication methods5 that enabled us to build a relationship. For the individual interviews, participants chose to meet in parks in the community, in private spaces within public libraries, as well as at a party room of an apartment building, in community recreation centers, and at the FIT office. But most often they chose to be interviewed at local community and youth resource centers. This choice of space is instructive, for it indicates that given the opportunity to visit the university, which is located beside their neighborhood, and while many of them have never been there, participants chose not to do so. The reason for electing not to come to the university campus might be reflective of the distant relationship between the university and the neighborhood, which in many ways has been seen by local residents (particularly youth) as “outside” the community and hence unfamiliar and perhaps unconcerned with their needs and experiences (James, 2012a). Other ways in which we sought to build trust and invite youth into the research process was through our approach to the interviews and focus

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groups. For example, the interviewers and focus group facilitators used icebreakers that were related to the youth’s interests (e.g., we would talk about movies, sports, and other activities in which they were engaged) and shared information about ourselves and our own interests to which they might relate. Our attempts to create a welcoming, comfortable, and nonjudgmental environment went a long way toward gaining the trust of the youth and encouraged many of them to introduce us to their friendship networks so that we could recruit other research participants. And as trusted researchers who were also working with research assistants who were part of their friendship networks and shared similar interests with them, we gained access to information about them that we might not have learned otherwise. For instance, outside of focus groups and interviews, youth would share and “update” us about their community ties, family and friendship issues, arrests, and jail sentences. Often this information was unsolicited and was received through text messages. Providing the participants legal information through lawyers and law students was additionally important to building their trust and creating a meaningful experience for all of us. If youth had questions about legal issues during the individual interviews, they were invited to contact a CLASP lawyer, who would address their questions. This was an opportunity many youth made use of. In both the focus group and workshop sessions, a lawyer and/or a law student was present to provide advice or information to participants about their legal rights and to answer questions and clear up misunderstandings that they had. The legal education component was particularly important in helping participants avoid providing information on pending court cases in conversations or through lyrics that would incriminate them or potentially be used against them and become legal concerns in the future. For this reason, the lawyer would educate them at the beginning of sessions about how they might avoid doing so. The youth came to accept that we were interested in their safety and in protecting their rights both in and out of school. In this regard, they asked questions, such as “What do I do when police stop me on the street when I walk to and from school?”; “How much weed can I carry on me?”; and “Why can’t I drink in the park?” And they talked of their difficulty finding lawyers whom they could trust. One youth shared that he had come to distrust the court system and lawyers because he received an unfair representation from a lawyer that resulted in him getting an 8-month jail sentence for an offense for which others had received a lesser sentence. As he explained, “They [lawyers] would set up a day where six of their clients go to court, and two of their clients are going down and four of their clients are going to get [good deals].” For his hearing, as he stated, his lawyer

158    C. E. JAMES and L. TAYLOR mostly brushed me off, took my thoughts and questions to the side and did his own thing. At the time, I thought it was a good strategy, like he was just saying don’t worry, he has it. He’s just that confident. In the end, I just felt he dump-trucked me. . . . I was set up just to take the fall. My experience wasn’t really that good.

Having the chance to relate such stories at the interview sessions gave the youth the chance to experience lawyers and law students who were committed to listening and addressing their concerns and hopefully gain a different perspective of lawyers and the justice system. Indeed, hearing from the lawyers and law students about their rights, what they might consider saying in certain situations, whether they can be searched, and when and how they need to comply with requests from police, proved very useful for the youth. As many of these lawyers worked in the local community and were well aware of the challenges facing the youth (James, 2012a), they were able to offer relevant and meaningful advice to the youth. For the most part, the lawyers encouraged youth to exercise “common sense” and not “needlessly antagonize police.” Honoring Community It was significant to the youth that we have a positive image of their community. Hence, in many of their early interactions with us, particularly in the focus group and workshop sessions, they would impress upon us the “good” things about their community, which is contrary to what the media report. As one young man proffered in his focus group, Yeah, I’ll just say that for a lot of people who’ve never evolved around here or don’t really have a sense of what goes on around here, they only know what they see on TV; they’re going to have nothing but bad things to say about it. Because the TV doesn’t show nothing good. . . . It’s totally different. Sometimes I sit down and I listen to what people think goes on around here. I say, “Damn! Man, this is what you really think goes on around here?” A lot of people really think that if they come down here their life is threatened. And it’s not even like they say. . . . I laugh because I know it’s not that bad. But sometimes you can’t change a person’s mind.

It seemed that the youth felt compelled to dispel the stereotypes or myths we may have had about their community because in their minds, we were part of the “lot of people” —at least initially—who might have thought of their community as “bad” and hence felt “threatened” by them. This is likely one of the reasons for them wanting us to conduct the interviews in spaces within the community. We saw further evidence of their attempts to educate us about their communities in their rap lyrics. But their communi-

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ties notwithstanding, they appropriately theorized that ultimately they are “products of society” and wished to fight against and challenge stereotypes and injustices they experienced and witnessed in their lives. Here is how one young man put it. This city is getting weak Listen as a person speaks Letting information leak We’re up shits creek Situation looks bleak War in the streets; War in Iraq War on guns; (and) War on crack Products of welfare; prisoners of war Products of society; time to fight back I know you don’t like it; but it’s life, Black.

Along the same lines, another male participant wrote, Yah, it’s a new era A new face To be the man; you got to beat the man . . . . I am what you made me; a product of society You are me; militarily; literally You conditioned me socially to move satanically Don’t believe me; turn on your TV And you’ll see; so much blood and gore . . . Money sex and drugs and Walmart slugs . . . . Oh please public people Release the captive people Cease being despicable Increase protection for survival Decrease perpetual capital made from residuals Of individuals who you made criminal The nominal exponential value of cultural piracy. . . . The policy of safe schools to kick out Blacks Allow police to racially profile Giving youth a criminal profile Unemployed; uneducated Illegal guns; organized clubs flood the hood with drugs And Stephen Harper6 pushed for mandatory minimum sentencing You see; this will guarantee the super prison’s population Build more prisons!!!! 81.1 million versus 50 million What a social investment They want to accommodate more Black youth inmates But tell me; who gets all the jobs this creates?

160    C. E. JAMES and L. TAYLOR Refrain: I will not give up; I will keep going! Keep going! You will not give up; you will keep going! Keep going! We will not give up; we will keep going! Keep going!”

In many of their lyrics, the youth demonstrated their strong understanding of the economic, social, and political conditions of society that have helped to shape their conditions and experiences. In the following example, a participant writes about his schooling experiences and his efforts to attain his educational aspirations. Yo, going into my third year at . . . University Look at what they did to me. I hardly made it I’m beat and I’m battered What I thought that never mattered. My dreams, they all were shattered But I still kept hope; God words helped me cope Walking a tight rope Administration never liked what they’re facing Colored my face as racist and I tried my hardest But I always failed tests. Mommy: the students loved me but the teachers hate me I make everybody laugh but I get kicked out of class. She served treats and gave me laughs She made me mad; talked about where’s my dad? Ma: do I make you proud? Because of school, I failed. They put me in ESL7 Canadian students say I’m dumb as hell But I run fastest when the teacher ring the bell

A major theme that emerges in the lyrics is the participants’ sense of social justice, which seems to be bolstered by their agency, their faith in God, their resilience, and their strong connections with and desires to honor their community. Through their lyrics, they deconstruct their social and educational worlds and used the research to “speak back” against unjust conditions with which they live (see Cammarota & Fine, 2008). The research, through the workshops, thus served as a tool for the youth to “talk back to community” (Cahill, Rios-Moore, & Threatts, 2008, p. 98), and educate us as researchers about the community—a community to honor. Empowering Youth Through Collaboration and Reciprocity Empowerment through reciprocity was an important consideration for us in this research and is aligned with our critical perspectives and com-

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mitment to socially just and culturally relevant research. We believe that research, as Lather (1991) puts it, must take us “beyond a concern for more and better data.” While our research goal was to gain knowledge about this group of youth and the conditions informing their lives, we sought to do so in ways that not only involved them in the process, but also helped to create a foundation for building future initiatives under their leadership and through a process of reciprocity which, as Harrison, MacGibbon, & Morton (2001) suggest, “involves give and take” (p. 325). In other words, reciprocity for us had meant providing youth the space and opportunity to share not only with us, but also with their peers, their own knowledge and experience, as well as a sense of possibilities and opportunities. We maintain that the participating youth were empowered by this research through the interviews and verses, which enabled them to critically reflect on their concerns and issues in relation to their communities and the society generally, and through the legal education, which provided them insights into their legal rights and the functioning of the judicial system. But there was also the collaboration with the youth in terms of them co-facilitating the focus group and workshop sessions. This meant that these youth gained facilitation and interviewing skills, and we gained insight into the world of the youth that we would never have gained otherwise. Take for instance the following exchange between the group and a youth co-facilitator in one focus group session. Facilitator (Leanne): Talk about your experiences with lawyers P.1: I had a lot of experiences. The longest one was in grade 8. Got kicked out of school because me and my friends fought this guy. We got charged. That’s when they started the Safe Schools Act. They put us into different schools and stuff. I got labeled as a bad kid after I was charged. Basically, every school I went to, they said, “This kid’s not good and we’re not going to give him no chance.” It wasn’t helping me. It was more hassle. They wanted me to go to these counselors at my school, and I didn’t want to. It was all after-school classes, and I didn’t want to waste my day. Co-Facilitator: The people that schools label as bad, it doesn’t help them? P. 1: No. P. 4: That’s not true. Mr. B., that Safe Schools’ guy, helped me out with a lot of problems I had. They do help the situation a lot, instead of calling the cops P. 5: If you act stupid, that’s when they make the problems. P. 4: Yeah, when you act dumb and ignorant. P. 5: If you act smart and say sorry, it will never happen. Facilitator: So the Safe School’s Act for you is helpful?

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P. 4: Yeah. P. 1: No. Because of the Safe Schools Act, they put me in different schools because every school I went to, they just want to put me in counseling classes. But I didn’t want to, because those counseling classes are really for bad students. I didn’t want to be labeled as that. So I didn’t want to go. P. 6: What if they deal with you one on one? Co-Facilitator: They didn’t want to deal with him one on one. Maybe because what you did was with a group, that’s probably why. P. 1: Yeah. Co-Facilitator: Sometimes, they want to move you to a smaller school to help you learn better because there are less distractions. As this exchange indicates, talking among peers and sharing their experiences, insights, guidance, and advice, co-facilitators played an important role in the focus group sessions. They talked directly to their peers, sometimes admonishing them about the consequences of their actions. For example, in one focus group, a participant was explaining how he felt that it was important to “defend yourself” regardless of the consequences (suspension, detention, etc.) when a teacher tells you to “get out” of the class. Immediately, the co-facilitator (age 17 years) interjected, saying, “No, it’s not. That’s what you got to get out of your head, right?” At other times in the session, this co-facilitator would interject, insisting that the participants need to “use your head.” And at other times, he would say to a participant to repeat what he or she had said: “Say that loud and clear so everybody can hear,” indicating that he felt that the point being made was important for everyone to pay attention to. At the end of the session, this co-facilitator reiterated that the youth needed to be smart about their actions. And referring to the discussion about the role of the police in the community, he commented, It’s true, we need the police to calm things down. It’s just like having traffic lights and stop signs. Without those, how many accidents would we have? . . . The reason the police are there is because there are a lot of weapons. If it was all about fists, there would be no trouble. Cops are there for one reason only: obey their rights and not abuse their power. But everything you do, there’s a rule that gets broken. Everywhere you go, there’s a rule that gets broken. There’s always one guy or one girl that breaks the rule and it sets a trend. You just have to know how to use your head. . . . You just have to stop and think sometimes.

This co-facilitator’s interventions are important data. Besides the logical reasoning, advice, and opinions he passed on to participants through his comments, his contributions also highlight the invaluable coaching and

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learning that can be conveyed through research, particularly in situations in which the research affords engagement among peers. In participating in the focus group and rap workshops, and in the Advisory Committee meetings, the youth had opportunities to help make the research meaningful, relevant, and beneficial to them. For example, one co-facilitator explained to focus group members that he and his friends and family would never have thought he would be participating in this kind of research. As he stated, “Look at this here. You never would have thought you seen me here. That’s how the world changes.” He told them that if they wanted things to change, then “You can’t do the same thing everyday.” In sharing his accomplishment, this co-facilitator sought to motivate and encourage his peers to weather challenging situations (at school, at home, and in the community) and take advantage of opportunities. He also felt that part of taking advantage of opportunities meant recognizing the allies and networks he was able to create through his involvement in the project, and on the research team in particular. For him, involvement was empowering because it allowed him to see differently what might be possible— knowledge he was committed to sharing with his peers in the focus groups. Of course, we recognize that part of the “give and take” of youth collaboration and reciprocity means noting where power relations interfere, as there are always power relationships between researcher and the researched. Ultimately, our research process, while involving youth and community at various stages and incorporating unconventional and more relevant methods, still depended on some traditional methods of data collection that might have remained disconnected from some youth’s experiences. As researchers, we make conscious and unconscious decisions at all stages of the research process (such as how we ask questions, what we observe, who makes decisions, who has the final word on what is published or disseminated, and to whom the research will be communicated). Further, while we sought to foster ongoing dialogue, something key to reciprocity, with the youth outside the interview/focus group context and built a relationship of trust, we realized this had limits. In the end, we were outsiders to the community and, ultimately, as Harrison et al. (2001, p. 334) put it, “impassive observers” rather than “participants” in the discussion. We also recognize that the research project, while focused on ensuring reciprocity through youth empowerment, was not necessarily equally empowering for all youth involved. While we see that the youth who participated in the focus groups were able to share their time and stories, “riff” off each other, offer each other support, gain access to legal advice, and make connections, those who were co-facilitators gained even more in terms of additional facilitation skills (and for some, a sense of confidence), in short, they gained cultural capital that would be useful to them.

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Conclusion If we are to truly understand how young people are affected by these social issues, and if we are to understand how to eradicate the social conditions that contribute to these issues, then we must listen to the young people who are most affected by them. Furthermore, we must equip young people with the investigative tools that allow them to collect, analyze, and distribute information about these issues from their unique perspectives as insiders. (Morrell, 2008, p. 158)

According to Morrell (2008), research can be a useful resource and tool for young people, especially those from low-income communities, to address the issues affecting them. But for this to happen, researchers need to engage with them, as well as see them “as legitimate and essential collaborators” and “knowledge producers” who have a vested interest in that which is being investigated. To this end, the research we undertook and the choices we made to work with youth and accommodate their wishes enabled us to conduct informed, culturally relevant, and responsive research that met their needs and those of their communities. Critical to this research process was the collaborative, respectful, and reciprocal relationship that we established with the youth, as well as the confidence that they developed in the research as something that is “worth doing” (Tilley, 1998). Also significant was not merely what we said or may have promised, but what our actions demonstrated while carrying out the research. What proved meaningful to the youth were the different opportunities they had to be heard (with peers, individually, and particularly through verse). They used these opportunities to talk about their struggles, offer advice to their peers, develop skills (including facilitation and lyric writing), and dispel myths about their community, experiences, and aspirations. Our goals and efforts to allow youth to have their voices heard is born out of our approach to critical youth studies specifically and critical theory more broadly. Thus, the youth accepted that the reason we were doing this work was to help them and their community of peers rather than take this information back to our “ivory tower,” never to return or share their stories. Further, they accepted our reasoning that access to justice begins with providing opportunities to learn about one’s rights. As one youth put it, “The more you learn about something, it’s better for you” because it allows you to “take a better approach.” Participants shared with us that what they valued most in the research process was that unlike their experiences in school, where they generally felt unheard, our approach to the research provided them several avenues in which to engage with us. As one participant stated,

“Talk to Students About What’s Really Going On”    165 I think my school needs to do stuff like this. I like this, ’cause then you could talk to students about what’s really going on. ’Cause nobody could actually tell you what’s going on unless [it’s] the person that’s experiencing it. So if you talk to students like this and don’t phony them out, . . . and then after they go get in trouble punish them . . . that won’t work. . . . A million kids don’t know their rights.

When asked whose responsibility it is to teach young people about justice and their rights, this participant continued, You’re supposed to get full justice everywhere you go—like in school, community centers, all those places you go. I think it should be taught in a lot of places, ’cause kids are going through so much. . . . Kids are not always wrong. I don’t think . . . most of the times they’re wrong. But sometimes, people wrong them. So if they knew about their right, . . . instead of going back and fighting and doing something worse, and making the situation more worse . . . , if they know they had access to justice, things would be better.

Notes 1. One government investigation at the time described Ontario as being “at a crossroads,” noting “the increasing concentration of violent crime among young people, the increasing frequency with which guns and knives are being used in disputes that might previously have been settled with fists, the increasing public nature of extreme violence, and the growing prevalence of both guns and gangs” (McMurtry 2009, p. 36; see also McMurtry & Curling, 2008). 2. It should be pointed out that we had to return to the funders for approval to provide some of these expenses. 3. It should be noted that we followed the typical research protocol. Participants signed consent forms prior to their interviews and involvement in the focus group and workshop sessions, which were all tape-recorded. Each person was assigned a pseudonym, and for the focus group sessions, each person was assigned a number. 4. Participants were also informed that all or a portion of their verse might be used for the purposes of the research in publications, but would not be used for commercial purposes. 5. Cell phone contact, including text messaging, was the major means by which we communicated with the youth. Scheduling and rescheduling the interviews meant that we had to be flexible. 6. Canada’s Prime Minister 7. English as a Second Language.

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References Bagnoli, A., & Clark, A. (2010). Focus groups with young people: A participatory approach to research planning. Journal of Youth Studies, 13(1), 101–110. Cahill, C., Rios-Moore, I., & Threatts, T. (2008). Different eyes/open eyes: Community-based participatory action research. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 89– 124). New York, NY: Routledge. Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2008). Youth participatory action research: A pedagogy for transformational resistance. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 1–12). New York, NY: Routledge. Daniel, Y., & Bondy, K. (2008). Safe schools and zero tolerance: Policy, program and practice in Ontario. Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 70. Retrieved September 12, 2009, from http://www.umanitoba.ca/publications/cjeap/pdf_files/daniel.pdf Delany, D. (2002). The space that race makes. The Professional Geographer, 54(1), 6–14. Dimitriadis, G. (2008). Series editor’s introduction. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine, (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. vii–viii). New York, NY: Routledge. Ginwright, S. (2008). Collective radical imagination: Youth participatory action research and the art of emancipatory knowledge. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine, (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 13–22). New York, NY: Routledge.. Gordon, P., & Klug, F. (1986). New right, new racism. London, UK: Searchlight. Harrison, J., MacGibbon, L., & Morton, M. (2001). Regimes of trustworthiness in qualitative research: The rigors of reciprocity. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(3), 323–345. Hinchey, P. H. (2008). Becoming a critical educator: Defining a classroom identity, designing a critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Howard, T. C. (2008). Who really cares? The disenfranchisement of African American males in pre-K–12 schools: A critical race theory perspective. Teachers College Record, 110(5), 954–985. Islam, N. (2000). Research as an act of betrayal: Researching race in an Asian community in Los Angeles. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing research, researching race: Methodological dilemmas in critical race studies (pp. 35–66). New York: New York University Press. James, C. E. (in press). Students at risk: Stereotypes and the schooling of Black boys. Urban Education James, C. E. (2012a). Life at the intersection: Community, class and schooling. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. James, C. E. (2012b). Troubling role models: Seeing racialization in the discourse relating to “corrective agents” for Black males. In K. Moffat (Ed.), Troubled masculinities: Re-imagining urban men (pp. 77–92). Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. James, C., & Taylor, L. (2008). Education will get you to the station: Marginalized students’ experiences and perceptions of merit in accessing university. Canadian Journal of Education, 31(3), 567–590.

“Talk to Students About What’s Really Going On”    167 Kincheloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Ed), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York, NY: Routledge. McMurtry, R. R. (2009). The roots of youth violence in Ontario Report. Education Law Journal, 19(1), 35–39. McMurtry, R., & Curling, A. (2008). Review of the roots of youth violence (2008): Executive summary. Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services. Retrieved from http://www.children.gov.on.ca/htdocs/English/topics/youthandthelaw/ roots/introduction.aspx Mitchell, R.W., Wood, G. K., & Witherspoon, N. (2010). Considering race and space: Mapping developmental approaches for providing culturally responsive advising. Equity & Excellence in Education, 43(3), 294–309. Morrell, E. (2008). Six summers of YPAR: Learning, action, and change in urban education. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine, (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 155–184). New York, NY: Routledge. Porfilio, B., & Carr, P. R. (Eds.). (2010). Youth culture, education and resistance: Subverting the commercial ordering of life (pp. 41–56). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Porfilio, B., & Malott, B. (Eds.). (2011). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: A new generation of scholars. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Porfilio, B., & Porfilio, S. (2010). Hip-hop pedagogues: Youth as a site of critique, resistance and transformation in France and in the neo-liberal social world. In B. Porfilio & P. R. Carr (Eds.), Youth culture, education and resistance: Subverting the commercial ordering of life (pp. 129–148). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Tilley, S. (1998). Conducting respectful research: A critique of practice. Canadian Journal of Education, 23(3), 316–328. Tilley, S. (2008). A troubled dance: Doing the work of research ethics review. Journal of Academic Ethics, 6(2), 91–104. Tilley, S., & Gormley, L. (2007). Canadian university ethics review: Cultural complications translating principles into practice. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(3), 368–387. Twine, F. W. (2000). Racial ideologies and racial methodologies. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing research, researching race: Methodological dilemmas in critical race studies (pp. 1–34). New York: New York University Press. Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1) 69–91. Zamudio, M. M., Russell, C., Rios, F.A., & Bridgeman, J. L. (2011). Critical race theory matters: Education and ideology. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Chapter 9

The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education Critical Race Theory and Burundian Children With Refugee Status Nicholas S. Mariner Allison Daniel Anders Jessica Nina Lester

Introduction In this chapter, we draw upon Nativism (Higham, 1955), Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1992) and Latino critical theory (Bernal, 2002) to frame the representation of a three-year postcritical ethnographic (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2004) study of the resettlement that Burundian children and families1 with refugee status2 endured in Riverhill (pseudonym), a small city in Appalachia in the rural South of the United States. Specifically, we analyze the political discourse of nativism and the ways in which it exacerbated neoconservative commitments in one elementary school that many of the Burundian children attended. We share our research findings about one local school, interviews with teachers and a principal, and fieldwork from

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 169–191 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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the community project with the families. We represent findings generated from our analysis, which include Burundian students’ disorientation, discouragement, and for some, forced tracking into special education, as well as educators’ articulations of assimilationist practices. First, we introduce the ethnographic project and literature focused on children with refugee status in relation to our postcritical commitments. Then we frame a brief history of nativism in the United States while representing the methodologies that informed this part of the project: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latino critical theory (Lat Crit). Third, we discuss Kanguka, a community project on public education created with Burundian families with refugee status. Finally, we share some of the analysis from the community project from CRT, Lat Crit, and a racist nativism perspective, exploring the tangled embodiment of bodies raced Black, located as “other,” and tracked by ethnocentric demands of English-speaking educators. We begin by describing the ways in which we situated our work in postcritical ethnography. A Postcritical Orientation With the rise the increasing population of immigrant children in U.S. classrooms, and with growing numbers of children with refugee status among them, there is a need for research and theoretical work that deepens understandings of issues children and families with refugee status face in public schools. According to Hamilton (2004), successful transitions in new societies of settlement are dependent upon mental and physical health, employment access and mobility, and education. More particularly, the acquisition of the language in the new society of settlement and positive everyday experiences at school are critical. Research on children with refugee status indicates that many of them may need more emotional support and commitment from teachers, additional time to concentrate in order to learn a task, and a safe space to express and/or process the loss that they feel. Some may experience social isolation while others may experience aggression. Many will experience headaches, stomachaches, and anxiety, particularly about death (Frater-Mathieson, 2004). Educational researchers know that most public school systems are systemically unprepared in regard to working with children who have emigrated to the United States (Goodwin, 2002). Further, educational researchers have found that children from diverse backgrounds and marginalized children respond positively to culturally sensitive and culturally relevant curricula (Delpit, 1996; Gitlin, Buendia, Crosland, & Doumbia, 2003; Howard, 1999), a practice and orientation to teaching that we rarely saw employed in our research.

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We began this work as ESL tutors in September 2008 in the South Prairie housing project, where the majority of the Burundian families lived (Mariner, Lester, Sprecher, & Anders, 2011). We recognized early on in our work that there were few resources for the Burundian families within what was a monolingual, predominately White city. The beginnings of this work and the ways we have come to understand our work in and with the Burundian community in Riverhill are layered, messy, and still unfolding (Anders & Lester, 2011). Our earliest research findings revealed that teachers and U.S.-born children struggled logistically and emotionally to respond and support the Burundian children and their families. Many of the children with refugee status faced anti-immigrant sentiment and the systemic effects of ethnocentrism. Following interviews in the fall of 2009 with the principal and the teachers of Red Valley Elementary School, the school attended by the majority of the children we tutored, we (Allison and Jessica) began making classroom observations, and in January 2010 we were asked to assist in a 3rd-grade classroom where four Burundian children studied. We spent 3 hours, two to three days a week, at Red Valley Elementary School and remained committed to postcritical perspectives in our work. We use postcritical ethnography in particular, including reflexivity and critiques of objectification, objectivity, and power, in order to pay attention to everyday lived experiences, relationships of institutional power, and our own positionality in the research. Postcritical approaches explicitly and implicitly address relationships of power across structure, discourse, and practice, and whenever possible, encourage reciprocity in relationships between the community and researchers (Noblit et al., 2004). For us, as we analyzed the institutionalization of policies and intersecting experiences of the Burundian families, our commitment to a postcritical orientation allowed us to attend to our own situatedness and complicity. We acknowledge our place in the discourses and practices in which we find ourselves navigating and recognize our responsibility in the ways we have come to represent and produce our work. Our postcritical orientation shapes how we spend time with the Burundian children and families, the choices we make around “next steps” in this research, and the ways we have come to position ourselves in this work. Layering Methodologies This postcritical ethnographic work is situated at the intersections of education, race, racism, and issues surrounding the symbolic and embodied violence (Bourdieu, 1977) of resettlement for children and families immigrating to the United States with refugee status. The Burundian children and adults navigated a complex web of oppression and discrimination, as

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they are raced as “Blacks” by Whites in the community, stigmatized as “other” through the culture and language of Whites, Blacks, and Latinos at the public schools and in the public housing projects where they live, and located outside the United States by Whites, Blacks, and Latinos as “Africans.” For us, to address the layers of context and multifaceted experiences, nativism, CRT and LatCrit provide effective threads to analyze data from the Burundian families and those educators who taught their children. Although our commitments to investigating issues of power in our postcritical approach inaugurated the beginnings of this work, we found over time that to contextualize the issues of power, we had to follow the layers of everyday lived experiences at the intersections of race, immigration, language, and nationality. For “labeling anti-immigrant actions merely racist functions to conceal the long and unique history of nativist restrictionist policies and negative societal attitudes toward immigrants that continue to the present day” (Galindo, 2011, p. 324). Here the experiences that the Burundians shared with us forced us to look for additions to our methodology and turn toward nativism, CRT, and Lat Crit. We were compelled to address issues of race, racism, Whiteness as property, and racialized language that persist in policies that reproduce nativist discourses and practices. Nativism Before representing our research in the field with the families and students with refugee status, it is necessary to historicize the problem of nativism, to place their experiences within the context of a long and cyclical trend of nativist politics in education. This section seeks to provide an overview of the historical scope of this particular targeting of students with immigrant and refugee status in U.S. schools. Nativism developed as a political and cultural trend as early as the 1850s when the formation of the United States was located far enough in the past for newer generations to consider themselves “native” Americans (Higham, 1955; Holt, 1978). In the decade immediately preceding the Civil War, nativism reached its zenith in the formation and political activity of the Know Nothing Party, a popular alternative to the Democrats in the South and the Whigs and fast-growing Republican Party of the North, which centered its platform around addressing the massive influx of new immigrants in the United States. This political party took up many of the same points in the anti–Democratic Party agenda, such as temperance and antislavery, but it twisted these issues into symptoms of the larger “disease” of immigration. From the Know Nothing Party perspective, prohibition of alcohol would not be necessary if not for the licentiousness of Irish or German immigrants, and slavery would always be more difficult to combat in

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the South while these same immigrants provided an equally cheap and unskilled labor force in the North (Holt, 1978, pp. 156–157). Only a truly free labor force (which needed to be Protestant and U.S.-born) could capture the true essence of the republican ideal (Foner, 1970). Historian John Higham, one of the first to write extensively on the subject, defined nativism in the United States as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., “un-American”) connections” (Higham, 1955, p. 4). He listed three predominant trends of nativism that remained persistent in the United States through its earliest iterations, that of anti-Catholicism, anti-radicalism, and racial nativism. He explained that anti-Catholicism and anti-radicalism worked primarily to explain what the United States was not: it was not Catholic, it was Protestant; was not it communist or socialist or anarchic, it was republican. But racial nativism tapped deeply into what America was: the manifest empire of Anglo-Saxon heritage ordained to guide the world toward social and political enlightenment. As we represent our research in this chapter, we argue that much of the nativism confronting Burundian students as they navigated public schools was decidedly racial/racist rather than anti-Catholic or anti-radical. Therefore, it is necessary to provide some discussion of the history of nativist policies in U.S. public education as well. Historically, U.S. public schools sat at the forefront of nativist political movements and thereby made a reasonable yardstick with which to measure the intensity of support for racially and ethnically exclusive sentiment. For instance, in the 1890s, Guy Major, representing the American Protective Association, achieved the mayoralty of Toledo, Ohio, by successfully running an anti-Catholic campaign in the city’s schools. To Major, the “Romanism” in Toledo schools was to be expunged for the sake of Americanizing large groups of German and Italian Catholic students. Additionally, he promoted a resolution to eliminate the city’s ward system, in order to replace it with a unified board of his choosing that would be without any Catholic or Progressive women members (Reese, 2002). Major and other nativist politicians provide a useful example of the two essential ways in which the politics of nativism are taken up around public education: a culturally exclusive curriculum and the foreclosure of educational access to immigrant children. He worked diligently and politicked endlessly to eliminate what he believed to be a Catholic (read un-American or nonnative) influence in schools. Immigrant children in the United States, especially in the cities where the largest groups of immigrants lived, posed a significant problem to the social fabric of the “ideal American,” from the languages they spoke, to their after-school jobs, to the way they wore their clothes (Nasaw, 1979). In the early parts of the 20th century, schools pursued the assimilationist agenda popularly called the “melting pot” to manage the massive influx of “new” immigrants: those families from Eastern Europe and other areas

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that would most likely bring in unwanted languages and cultural practices to the United States (Graham, 1995). One of the most persistent school policies pursued during this time was English-only classrooms. Parroting the party line of the Know Nothings a half-century before (Voss-Hubbard, 2002), reformers in groups like the American Protective Association argued that English should be declared the only legitimate language in the United States and therefore, the only one worth teaching in public classrooms. While some immigrant groups, like Germans in Cincinnati, held enough political sway to earn the right to transfer to private schools that would welcome their native language, schools in cities throughout the United States moved to adopt English as the only language for instruction (Reese, 1995; Tyack, 1974). Ultimately, the debate over language in schools across the last century had less to do with establishing a common language than it did in excluding those things deemed “un-American,” in sustaining a cultural and political empire of dominance through language conversion (Macedo, Dendrinos, & Gounari, 2003). The standardization of knowledge continues as an extension of monocultural educational politics. Like declaring English the only legitimate language, debates over which standards to impose on U.S. public schools are debates over which knowledge is to be considered most legitimate (Symcox, 2002). In the famous report, A Nation at Risk (1983), the National Commission on Excellence in Education, written during the Reagan administration, described an exigent need for U.S. schools to boost their academic output through a reevaluation of performance and a coordination of highly monitored standards. These standards were to ensure that graduates would remain competitive in the marketplace and, by extension, the United States would remain a competitive world power. In that same decade, E. D. Hirsch (1987) called for a “cultural literacy” in the United States, a national language that could unify an industrialized nation toward a single goal. Such a national language would be English and it also would carry a unified culture, a set of signposts whose mastery marked the learner’s ascension into the ranks of national community member (pp. 84–87). And members of that community, these standards declared, were English-speaking capitalists. In this way, to be “American” is a learned and performative experience. However, Nativism does not just dictate what kind of education students receive and allow for the success of only those who master it. Nativistic politics permeate discussions of educational access that keep particular racial and ethnic groups from even having the chance at correctly learning the appropriate performance of “American-ness.” For instance, while the melting pot era forced many Eastern European immigrants to shed their home cultures for “American” ones, Blacks in the South, Mexicans and Native Americans living in the Southwest, and even some Chinese and Japanese groups in the West were continually denied education based on

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the racial markers White supremacist policies generated (Graham, 1995). These groups have historically faced what Pérez Huber (2008) calls a “racist nativism” by being burdened with a specific impossibility to gain access to the greater national community. While they can learn the appropriate language, knowledge, and capitalistic spirit, they can never be “American” because they are not White. In 1994, California voters passed a referendum called Proposition 187 (popularly called the Save Our State initiative), which specifically addressed the perceived threat of “illegal” immigrants deteriorating the standard of life the state was able to provide its “legitimate” citizenry. Section 7 of this referendum specifically declared that No public elementary or secondary school shall admit, or permit the attendance of, any child who is not a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted as a permanent resident, or a person who is otherwise authorized under federal law to be present in the United States. (CA Proposition 187, 1994)

Although this proposition was eventually ruled unconstitutional 5 years later, its passage through popular vote indicates a widespread sentiment that denotes two conceptions of the relationship between immigrants: space and politics. First, this form of immigration bill indicates an understanding that Whites laid the first (or at least most legitimate) claim to the United States, and therefore all non-Whites were visitors or borrowers of the land. This notion also carries with it the second assumption that Whites could then deny rights to that land and its privileges if they deemed it misused (Garcia, 1995). In extending these assumptions to public education, motions like Prop 187 move the implementation of nativist policies beyond curricular choices to the question of access of school resources. Nativist policies targeted at educational access continue to flood the discourse of public education since Prop 187. In 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that allowed for the request of immigration papers from anyone suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. She followed with another bill that removed area and ethnic studies programs from Arizona public schools (Arizona SB 1070; Arizona HB 2281). Alabama soon followed with its own bill, which allowed school districts to verify the immigration status of each student and deny any undocumented student from receiving an education at public elementary and secondary schools, as well as state universities (Alabama HB 56). These new bills exemplify stricter regulation and enforcement of immigration laws and reflect Pérez Huber’s definition of racist nativism, which entails “the assigning of values to real or imagined differences to justify the superiority of the native . . . and thereby defend the native’s right to dominance” (Pérez Huber, 2010; Pérez Huber, Lopez, Malagon, Velez, & Solórzano, 2008). In this definition, the

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native is always perceived to be White and the nonnative always perceived to be a person of color. The nativist politics of access in U.S. public education reflected in the continued proposition of state bills such as these seek to declare schools as a White space, able to be borrowed and utilized by non-Whites when necessary, but also able to be denied when thought appropriate by those in power. It is within this historical context of nativist politics that we came to better understand the educational experiences of Burundian children with refugee status. Critical Race Theory Multiculturalism might serve as a way to understand some of the Burundian children’s learning experiences and the unpreparedness of many of the teachers working in U.S. public school systems. However, we find ourselves in agreement with Ladson-Billings and Tate (2006), who name multiculturalism “as a political philosophy of ‘many cultures’ existing together in an atmosphere of respect and tolerance” (p. 25) and insufficient in its application to the analyses of the racist, ethnocentric, and nativist practices that children raced non-White and located outside the borders of the United States endure. Policies that purport a “welcome to all and hostility toward none” line fail in the discernment of practice. For just as the “welcome to all” may have included a Burundian child new to Riverhill, it included also the virulent expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment from leadership in the Riverhill County School system. We argue that systemic changes cannot be provided for teachers and administrators solely through reflexive exercises and professional development workshops on multiculturalism. The amelioration needed includes distinctions across dominant and targeted discourses and activism that promotes equity and not equality alone. In contrast to multicultural rhetoric, CRT centers race, racism, and the experiences of people of color who have been historically marginalized by “Whitestream” narratives. Critical Race theorists question the permanence of racism in the analyses of systemic issues of disenfranchisement, poverty, and oppression (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell (1992) encouraged his readers to move “beyond the comforting belief that time and the generosity of its people will eventually solve America’s racial problem” (p. 13) and argued that over time, racial patterns continue to reflect White dominance, regardless of efforts to pursue equality and equity. For Bell, such an acknowledgement does not echo submission to the White supremacist racial hierarchy, but rather provides the potential generation

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of meaningfulness in the construction of defiance of the dread. Bell explained that while no one escapes death, those who conquer their dread of it are freed to live more fully. In similar fashion, African Americans must confront and conquer the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status. Only in this way can we prevent ourselves from being dragged down by society’s racial hostility. Beyond survival lies the potential to perceive more clearly both a reason and the means for further struggle. (p. 12)

Those who are interested work toward the delegitimation of the racism perpetuated by White dominance, address its centeredness in the history of the United States through forced subordination during slavery and after through the lynching campaigns and legal segregation in the Jim Crow South (Du Bois, 1935; Jordan, 1968; Rosen, 2009; Woodward, 1955), and acknowledge its permanence and the related consequences “in the real lives of black and white people” (Bell, 1992, p. 198). This work must also confront the racial hierarchy in the United States created by nativism, a hierarchy that remains in flux yet sustains White supremacy within that hierarchy always (Pérez-Huber, 2010). Though certainly not every CRT scholar explores race and racism in the way Bell does, for us, Bell’s scholarship and activism establishes one way to communicate to others that which we witnessed in the racist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, and nativist discourses and practices in Riverhill, and postcritical ethnography allows us as researchers to work against the racism we embody and perpetuate as we engage in the research and practice recursive reflexivity (Noblit et al., 2004). Although Bell (1992) argued that commitment and engagement generate meaningfulness, he cautioned readers against wishes for success and challenged ideas of “transcendent change” (p. 198). Bell’s thoughts in regard to engagement, commitment, and service included a call for humility and recognition of the struggle. He stated, We must first recognize and acknowledge (at least to ourselves) that our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and may indeed, despite our best efforts, be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system whom we are trying to help. Then, and only then can that realization and the dedication based on it lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less likely to remind the powers that be that out there are persons like us who are not only not on their side but determined to stand in their way. (pp. 198–199)

Following Bell (1992), we argue for and analyze our work from the position of recognizing both the permanence of racism and “the unalterable conviction that something must be done, that action must be taken”

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(p. 199). So, in the winter of 2010, we began a series of what became four family and two community meetings with over 15 different Burundian families to discuss public education in the United States and learn about and invite the questions and critiques they had. Prior to discussing this community project, which Burundians named Kanguka, in the next section, we address the third and final framework that allowed us to analyze the complex everyday experiences Burundian children endured in their public schools and in the public housing projects where they lived. Latino Critical Theory Both CRT and LatCrit center the importance of race, racism, and the intersections of race with other targeted identities while celebrating experiential knowledge and transdisciplinary approaches, challenging dominant ideologies, and promoting activism for racial and social justice (Solórzano, 1998). Valdes (1996) positioned LatCrit as “supplementary, complementary to [CRT] . . . related in real and lasting ways” (pp. 26–27). Like CRT, LatCrit emphasizes the importance of analyzing discourses and practices for their racialized content while challenging the neoconservative and neoliberal ideas of color-blindness and meritocracy (Delgado & Stefancic, 1994). Moreover, LatCrit scholars theorize about language, immigration, culture, and the multidimensionality of Latinas/Latino’s identities positioned at the intersections of “racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression” (Bernal, 2002, p. 108). In our research, the layers of oppression that the Burundian children and their parents faced included the dominance of English in a city where few people spoke their language (Kirundi). Although Burundian adults and parents pursued ESL classes and encouraged their children to learn English, many of the White teachers framed bilingualism from a deficit perspective. As Bernal (2002) has argued, bilingualism “often continues to be seen as ‘un-American’” and framed as a “deficit” and an “obstacle to learning” (p. 122). Often teachers underestimate the abilities of non–English speakers who are “not yet fluent in English” (Fernández, 2002, p. 51). Additionally, the longer one resides in the United States, the more likely one will be to lose her or his native language. As long as bilingual education is not offered consistently across the United States, children will be forced to conform to the monolingual expectations of English. A lack of bilingual education may result in many children losing their language and over time, losing communication with their own families intergenerationally. As Portes and Rumbaut (2001) explained, this loss affects one’s sense of self and culture: “Losing a language is also losing a part of one’s self that is linked to one’s identity and cultural heritage” (p. 144).

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Both dominance and forced acquisition of the English language in U.S. public schools and the experience of being raced and othered affected our Burundian participants. Nativism and CRT alone did not address the intersections of this oppression and U.S. ethnocentrism and xenophobia; thus, the stories we documented led us to LatCrit as well. We were particularly drawn to LatCrit’s emphasis on the multidimensionality of identities and its ability to attend to the intersectionality of all forms of oppression. Further, from a LatCrit perspective, there is a radical recognition that “students of color are holders and creator of knowledge,” even while having “their histories, experiences, cultures, and language devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings” (Bernal, 2002, p. 106). So we took up both a CRT and LatCrit lens as we sought to acknowledge and support “systems of knowing and understanding that counter the dominant Eurocentric epistemology” (Bernal, 2002, p. 121) in our schools and communities. To honor the systems of knowing present in the members of the Burundian community, we pursued a community project to open space for their thoughts and voices, which we describe in the next section. Kanguka: A Community Project From 2007 to 2010, approximately 200 Burundian adults and children resettled in Riverhill. The culture of public schools and the public housing projects where Greenland Refugee Resettlement Agency, the local resettlement agency, placed most of the families discouraged many Burundian families. Support was limited and responsiveness sporadic from the local resettlement agency. Resources were strained at the local health department and were inconsistent and undeveloped in the English-language learning (ELL) programs in the Riverhill County Schools. During the earliest resettlements, a group of teachers and administrators at Riverhill Country Schools worked to shut down Greenland. As one administrator, who was a part of this group, shared, “We don’t want anymore [Burundians].” Hoping to cease immigration, this group wrote and met with state representatives about the families with refugee status. In Riverhill, Greenland’s challenge to find local sponsors to assist in the transition of each family was difficult. Families without sponsors experiences immediate financial hardship, limited mobility and social isolation. Neo-isolationist and anti-immigrant sentiment pervaded the community. Further, soon after their arrival, many of the Burundian children were considered for and eventually placed in alternative education and special education environments, with some experiencing the most restrictive environments. Aware of the historically disproportionate placement of children of color in special education (Bayton, 2001; Eitle, 2002), we were particularly

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concerned with the speed at which Burundian children were been assessed, identified as (emotionally and learning) “disabled,” and placed in noninclusive environments. The Office of Special Education Programs (2003) reported that in comparison to all other ethnic groups, Black students are 2.99 times more likely to be labeled intellectually impaired and 2.21 times more likely to be identified as emotionally disturbed. Some research indicates that this overrepresentation may be a result of culturally biased and narrowly defined notions of cognitive and affective functioning (Artiles, Trent, & Kuan, 1997), something that we argue has significant consequences for immigrant children of color. As our research and community work unfolded, we moved between acting as advocates for Burundian families (upon their request) during official meetings that determined the educational placement of their children, to providing ESL tutoring, to meeting with families to fill out paperwork for food stamps and health insurance (Anders & Lester, 2011). We knew that we needed to create some type of response to the many questions we were receiving in relation to education in the United States. In the fall of 2010, after multiple requests from Burundian families to meet and discuss all that was happening in relation to their children’s education, we began to develop “school guides” in relation to the families’ questions that included critiques of the U.S. educational system. Rukundo Munezero Mbabazi, our collaborator and translator, and Mahoro, a member of one of the families with refugee status, named this community project “Kanguka,” which is Kirundi for “wake up.” The community project eventually included a series of community and family meetings in the neighborhoods and homes of Burundian families focused on addressing the history, socialization, and politics of public education in the United States. Specifically, we constructed three guides focused on the (a) history of education in the United States; (b) ESL in U.S. public schools; and (c) special education rights, responsibilities, and possibilities. We initially shared these guides in the homes of Burundian families, alongside our collaborator and translator, Mbabazi. As we shared, we invited questions, with the families’ responses leading us to adapt and build upon our unfolding “school guides.” After one such meeting, we received a message from Mbabazi, in which she shared the following: December 14, 2010 Hi Jessica. This is Rukundo Munezero Mbabazi. I’m calling on behalf of Mahoro and Mbabazi [Burundian parents with whom we met]. After we talked, they said that was a good program, a good program [i.e., school guides]. They wished they knew all these things before they just got here. It’s a very very important message that you have for them and they were wondering if other people are going to know about this program. Are they going to get this mes-

The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education    181 sage? They like it so much because it’s helping their kids and their parents and their house to be successful at the school. So I don’t know if you are going to go house-by-house, door-by-door, but they wish everybody can know this about this.

We followed their suggestion and began holding community meetings in which we shared the information on the “guides” with the Burundian parents. Red Valley Elementary School The everyday discourses and experiences described by the families and the educators in the schools the families’ children attended invited the layers of racist nativism, CRT, and LatCrit. In 2009, approximately 18 months after the first Burundians resettled in Riverhill, Mr. Faith, the principal at the elementary school where we volunteered as classroom tutors, sent a letter to his colleagues at the other elementary schools in the district, his supervisors in the district administration, and President Obama. The following is an excerpt from that letter, in which Mr. Faith pleads for assistance, resources, and systemic change regarding the categorization of children with refugee status under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the requirements associated with making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Threaded throughout his letter is an invitation for empathy for the imperialist position Mr. Faith has placed himself in as an educated citizen and civilized savior. Raced White in this instance, he is positioned to uplift the “illiterate savage” who must be “taught” to “eat with utensils” and “to flush a toilet.” He wrote, The focus of this letter is to address the category of our refugee children. At this time, refugee children are categorized as ESL (English Second Language). Furthermore, many of these refugee children also fall under the subgroup ED (Economically Disadvantaged). We encourage you to be a voice for public education and request that refugee children be categorized in their own subgroup pertaining to AYP and the NCLB mandate. Refugee children, like ESL children, are exempt from affecting AYP data for one year. After the first year, like ESL children, refugee children are only given accommodations and are counted toward our AYP. This is not right! We make progress with these children; however, at the end of the year we are asked to place an eight-hour test on their desks and ask that they be proficient in reading, math, science, and social studies. Most refugee children come to this country with no English speaking or writing ability. They come from deplorable conditions, many with no formal educational background. Yet, in just one year, we are expected to have them comprehensively proficient to take and pass the end-of-the-year TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program) standardized test. The accom-

182   N. MARINER, A. ANDERS, and J. LESTER modations for these students are not sufficient for their needs. Many refugee students have to be taught first how to flush a toilet, sit in a chair at a desk, and eat with utensils.

As a principal of 5 years and former math and science teacher, Mr. Faith expressed an earnest interest in changing the evaluative components of NCLB and AYP and a strong commitment to “steering” his school, like a “ship,” in the right direction. Paraphrasing conversations with the faculty working at his school, Mr. Faith shared, “There’s many more things, much more important, [than] teaching math, science, social studies and reading. It’s, it’s loving children and getting to know our children and respecting our children, and then in return receive that respect back.” During a formal interview, Mr. Faith explained that although he might have particular commitments to “inclusiveness” in his school and to caring for all the children who attended Red Valley, public education as a whole was not prepared to invest a similar commitment. He positioned himself as the exception, presumably one of the few in the field of teaching who shared these commitments. He shared that, “Public education, in and of itself, is not prepared to take on a group of people with such different cultures and language barriers and ideas.” Mr. Faith persisted in uncovering education’s lack of preparation by using the deficiency of the students, not the institution, as his primary frame of reference. That is to say, according to Mr. Faith’s assessment, the job of educating children with refugee status would not be so daunting if they arrived in public schools with performances that reflected dominant White, middle-class standards. His implicit message seemed also to be that it is only through the grace of steadfast “good white” (Thompson, 2003) educators that any progress is made at all. In the interest of saving his own school’s academic performance rating, Mr. Faith sought an entirely different legal classification of students with refugee status, one that positioned their deficits as “other,” non-U.S., and primitive. Racist nativism, CRT, and LatCrit, all point to the deleterious effects of targeting through legal, bureaucratic channels; a process that categorizes a group’s otherness, their nonnative and therefore nonnormative cultures, behaviors, and languages, by binding Whitestream norms to legal definitions (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). In seeking to keep the State from targeting his school for failing to meet AYP, Mr. Faith instead requested that the State target the students with refugee status for lack of adequate progression along Whitestream measurements. Using deficit perspectives based on racist nativism, Whitestream values and English dominance, Mr. Faith described South Prairie, one of the neighborhoods Red Valley Elementary School serves. When the Burundians began to arrive, Greenland Refugee Resettlement Agency placed almost all of the families and individuals in public housing projects across

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Riverhill. South Prairie was one of these projects and still houses over a dozen Burundian families. When talking about South Prairie, Mr. Faith offered that it was a government-funded housing program for the indigent and the poor and the needy. It’s a very old, old development. There’s third- and fourth-generation families living in South Prairie. It’s become a way of life instead of a sense of help to get on your feet and, and, and be productive. So with that mindset, in South Prairie, you have a village. And in that village you have poor Whites, poor Blacks, poor Hispanics. I, I, I think you have some educated people, some uneducated people. You have people in dire straits. And, and it’s probably one of your tougher housing developments in Riverhill. I’ve heard many describe South Prairie as being a third-world country. And, and I have gone into the homes many times, and feel safe. But it’s, I think, my years here, and relationships that I’ve built with the parents. I don’t think a stranger would feel safe there.

Through these words, Mr. Faith privileged residence, access, and class. He coupled race with his authority, which likely granted him the mobility to move in and out of South Prairie, while articulating his neoconservative position on the purpose of public housing projects. Othering not only the Burundians by their residence in South Prairie, but also all those who live there, he located and pathologized poverty in the geography and materiality of the housing project and in the families who Mr. Faith assumed lived there for more than a generation. As a White, male, professional educator located with citizenship in his country of birth and only place of residence, he constructed the “third-world country” as a category of poverty and place. He performed the exception in this telling, stating, “I have gone into the homes many times, and feel safe. But it’s, I think, my years here, and relationships that I’ve built with the parents. I don’t think a stranger would feel safe there.” Yet, when asked about culture and preparation for Burundian children and any child attending Red Valley who was a non–English speaker, his performance shifted—he no longer performed the exception. Rather, his telling became one that invited the “universal we” that is so often positioned as the unknowing, but “good-hearted” Whitestream majority. When asked about preparation for the students’ arrival, Mr. Faith shared, I think the first thing you have to do is, is, is, is you have to get a history. And, and you have to learn the culture of, of these children coming in. They’re not going to adapt immediately. And, and out of our own ignorance, I’ll just be honest with you, I couldn’t have even told you where Tanzania was exactly. I kinda had an idea of where it was, but I couldn’t tell you. Or . . . or Burundi or anywhere else, that we have trouble finding Nashville.

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Although Mr. Faith admits he did not know where Burundi is, he excused rather than owned the admission, citing his imagined fellows and the trouble they, performed above as “we,” have finding a city in the region. In describing the “progress,” Mr. Faith provided an example of the everyday reproduction of racist nativism in schools. Through Mr. Faith’s words, we noted that the goal of assimilation was both literal and symbolic. We had to teach these children how to use the bathroom and how to eat and, and of course their social skills are entirely different than ours. So as I look at the evolving . . . our evolving setting, I think about where they were—pulling them out of trees, putting their clothes back on—you can walk into any classroom in this building where these children are now placed in a self-contained setting, and you would actually probably have to point them out for a visitor to come in and say, “Where are they?” They, they have, they have blended, they have blended that well in the, in the social setting of a self-contained classroom.

Here, Mr. Faith assumed in his imagination a visitor who is White, native to the United States, and non–Kirundi speaking, not even seeing the children who we know self-identify as “African,” not as “Americans.” The account that provides both the performance of good White and the claimed success of “blending” represents an everyday practice of racist nativism. We represent these tellings, which we have named racist nativism, to indicate the fluidity and complexity of race and nativistic thought present in public education when addressing students with immigrant and refugee status. Mr. Faith’s celebration of the Burundian students’ assimilation into the Whitestream classroom illustrates the ways in which racist nativism is at work in the everyday educational practices and implicit and explicit judgments cast upon nonnative students. Our ongoing classroom observations and interactions with Burundian families in the community taught us much about the ways in which the school system worked to “other” and even target the Burundian youth and families and cultivate a presumed superiority of native U.S. cultural norms. These moments were always complicated, layered, and filled with contradiction. We invited these layers into the very way we heard and experienced what the teachers, children, and parents shared, as the experiences these participants lived demanded that we have a methodology complex enough to represent their experiences. We were committed to investigating relationships of power, focusing on race and racism while leaning on critical race theory and work about the institutionalization and permanence of racism. Issues of resettlement, geography, nationality, and language also called us to broaden our understandings of CRT to LatCrit and racist nativism. Postcritical ethnography provided ways to navigate this complexity. When we stood in the school hallways with the teachers, they would spend time explaining their practices and school and districtwide policies,

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justifying the actions that resulted in so many Burundian families feeling isolated, discouraged, and disconnected. They often implied that their hands were tied. One afternoon in the ESL classroom, after observing an exciting and rousing game of Go Fish, Erin, the ESL teacher, and I (Jessica) stood side by side as three Burundian children slowly walked back to their home classrooms. Erin touched my arm and shared in a hushed tone how frustrated she was with the state standards and assessment requirements. I later wrote about this encounter in my field notes: September 25, 2009 As the children left the room, Erin touched my elbow and started sharing her frustration. She told me about the “state standards” and how the Burundian children had to be given the state assessment. They all failed, she thought, or maybe one child passed. The principal and other teachers, she shared, “don’t think I’m doing my job and want me to just do worksheets with the kids. They think that’ll make their scores go up.”

Concerns about assessment and curriculum were central to most of our conversations with the teachers. From conversations around the frustrations with state assessments to requests for more Dick and Jane readers to help the Burundian children “improve” and become “better English speakers,” we learned quickly that the curriculum dictated almost all that transpired in the classroom. The standards, curricular objectives, and norm-based assumptions about White, middle-class child development were frequently drawn upon to make predictions and draw conclusions about the Burundian children’s potential as “American” students. When students did not make “adequate yearly progress,” they were frequently labeled, occasionally socially promoted, and/or tracked into special education services. Frequently, principal and teacher actions at Red Valley Elementary School were quick and not always easy to follow. One of my research journal entries spoke to this speed and disregard for parental input: March 2010 This month has been painful, full of surprises, unexpected meetings and calls. Rukundo Munezero Mbabazi’s evening calls to share the news that yet another special education meeting has been called—I’ve come to expect it. It still takes my breath away. This is how the system works. How much more confusion can they create for the families? I arrived at one school today and a Burundian mother wrapped her arms around my waist and said, “Thank you for coming. I don’t understand what is happening.” I did. Her son was being tracked—out. Knowing the white principal was listening to our conversation, I nodded and said, “Ask questions and don’t sign what you don’t want to.” Black bodies named “disordered.” It always happens so fast—at least for me.

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After we spent nearly a year making classroom observations and volunteering as reading tutors at Red Valley Elementary School, we began to hear of more and more Burundian children across the district being considered for special education services or new educational placements. Quite often, the Burundian parents were called to the school, told to sign a piece of paper that would “help” their child, with the child subsequently place in what we came to call the “most restrictive environment.” Some parents received letters or phone calls from the school office, often in English, informing them of their child’s meeting—a meeting that would be held whether they decided to attend or not. They attended. So did we. As the number of children being considered for special services increased, so too did the number of invitations we received from the Burundian families to attend the school meetings. We attended as advocates and friends. As a former special educator, I (Jessica) often spent time with the families prior to the meetings, discussing their legal rights and responsibilities. It is in these meetings that our “school guides” began to be written and the Kanguka project (although not yet named such) began. The parents and children asked the questions they wanted—needed—to have answered. “What will happen to my son after high school?” “Do I have to sign the paper?” “Does my son have to go to the discipline classroom for the rest of the year?” And they taught us what should be asked, what should be included on the guides. Across these examples from our research and interactions with the school and families from Burundi, we locate racist nativism in public education in three-layered and interacting forms. First, it occurs at the institutional, bureaucratic level in legally classifying refugee families as “the other.” In an attempt to reconcile their educational needs with standardized forms of “progress,” administrators like Mr. Faith employed a deficit perspective to demonstrate the differences between native knowledges and White, U.S.native normativity; a perspective that positions the other to seek mercy from the State. Ironically, Mr. Faith seeks mercy from the State for himself and for his school, as well. Second, nativism surfaces at the curricular level, creating at once an assimilating set of lessons and expectations and an “objective” tool by which students who fail to meet those assimilating standards can be placed outside the mainstream classroom. And third, racist nativism permeates the daily practices of public education, taken up by educators and administrators invested in the bureaucratic efficiency of NCLB and the superiority of Whitestream values. The everyday practices and implicit and explicit judgments cast upon nonnative students’ dress, language, behavior, and academic output constitute parts of the lived experience for students with refugee status and their families, and are a real consequence of bureaucratic and curricular racist nativism. We came to understand our research and experiences with the families with refugee status by keeping ourselves methodologically open to avenues

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for critique. We began our work committed to a postcritical interrogation of power (Noblit et al., 2004), which led us to consider the way the racialized bodies of these students and families positioned them in the district, opening the possibilities for analysis with CRT (Bell, 1992). As exchanges continued with the families and the school district, it became clear that LatCrit offered unique critiques of how the students were often othered through their language and status as “foreign” to the United States (Bernal, 2002). Finally, Pérez-Huber (2010) offered ways for us, as researchers, to couple postcritical approaches, CRT, and LatCrit to the historical trends of racist nativism. We learned through this process the value of allowing intersecting frameworks to guide the research and to locate those areas in which power was being imposed and contested. Conclusions From our research and time with the students and families so far, we suggest that the discussion of racist nativism in public education, as it pertains to institutional practices, must continue, uncovering its appearance in bureaucratic institutions, curricula, and everyday practice. We argue that the continuation of nativist politics, originating as early as 1850 in the United States, continues to permeate the standardized testing movement, school structures, and the current state of high-stakes testing. Often the language of institutional standardization uses the rhetorical language of “progress” (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top imply a sense of moving upward and onward). Consequently, it is “progress” that these programs seek to measure. These programs, however, use an “objective” measure, AYP, which requires knowledge of and practice in the Whitestream process of schooling to correctly navigate. Progress, then, at the daily schooling level, becomes an act of culturally assimilating nonnative students, as they are first taught to flush toilets and sit properly in their desks before they can be considered capable learners and begin to make progress toward “legitimate” educational goals. The assumptions made in this process of framing nonnative students in this way, as culturally deficient learners, reflect racist, nativist values aligned with the superiority of Whitestream educational practices. These are the practices that devalue the cultures and knowledges of nonnative students and ultimately seek to expunge any trace of them from the classroom for the sake of test performance. The Burundians have been in the United States for only 3 years, and because their experiences are particular and local, this new data is essential for a broader conversation around student experiences with refugee status in U.S. schools. Henry Giroux (1983) stated that “the main functions of schools are the reproduction of the dominant ideology . . . [and] its forms

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of knowledge” (p. 257), and racist nativism certainly is one facet of the dominant ideology being constantly reproduced in U.S. public education. Many authors cited within this chapter have already described, identified, and labeled nativism in schools. We hope our contribution to this field of critique comes in describing the layering of our methodology, alongside nativism, CRT, and LatCrit. This approach helped us navigate structures of power to more fully critique them. We hope our experiences with the families provide new, illustrative examples of how the power dynamics of racist nativism actually work in the particular. Analyzing how their everyday experiences and their teachers’ stories are historically situated in a larger, longer trend of nativism in U.S. politics and educational policy provides an opportunity to engage in a much needed dialogue about the consequences of an environment in which students of color with refugee status are quickly targeted. Notes 1. The Burundian families with whom we work came from refugee camps in Tanzania after having fled first from Congo and Rwanda due to violence between the Tutsi and Hutu identified people in 1972. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1997, the Burundians fled again to Tanzania. In 2007, Burundian families began resettling in the United States after the Tanzanian policies denied them naturalization and property rights (UNHCR, 2008). The Burundian children and families with whom we work are now transitioning to their third country of settlement. 2. In our work, we have chosen “refugee status” to represent the Burundians we know, as they self-identify first as either African or Burundian.

References Anders, A., & Lester, J. (2011). Living in Riverhill: A postcritical challenge to the production of a neoliberal success story. In B. Portofino & H. Hickman (Eds.), Critical service learning as revolutionary pedagogy: A project of student agency in action (pp. 223–249). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Artiles, A. J., Trent, S. C., & Kuan, L. A. (1997). Learning disabilities research on ethnic minority students: An analysis of 22 years of students published in selected refereed journals. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 12, 82–91. Bayton, D. C. (2001). Disability and the justification of inequality in American history. In P. K. Longmore & L. Umansky (Eds.), The new disability history: American perspectives (pp. 33–82). New York City: New York University Press. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic.

The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education    189 Bernal, D. D. (2002). Critical race theory, Latino critical theory, and critical racedgendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126. Bordieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. California Proposition 187. (1994). Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press. Delpit, L. (1996). Other people’s children. Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: New Press. Du Bois, W. E .B. (1935). Black reconstruction of America, 1860–1880. New York, NY: Free Press. Eitle, T. M. (2002). Special education or racial segregation: Understanding variation in the representation of Black students in educable mentally handicapped programs. The Sociological Quartlerly, 43(4), 575–605. Fernández, L. (2002). Telling stories about school: Using critical race and Latino critical theories to document Latina/Latino education and resistance. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 45–65. Foner, E. (1970). Free soil, free labor, free men: The ideology of the Republican party before the Civil War. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Frater-Mathieson, K. (2004). Refugee trauma, loss and grief: Implications for intervention. In R. Hamilton & D. Moore (Eds.), Educational interventions for refugee children: Theoretical perspectives and implementing best practices (pp. 12–34). London: Routledge Falmer. Galindo, R. (2011). The nativistic legacy of the Americanization era in the education of Mexican immigrant students. Educational Studies, 47, 323–346. Garcia, R. J. (1995). Critical race theory and Proposition 187: The racial politics of immigration law. Chicano-Latino Law Review, 17(118). Giroux, H. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of Education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational Review 53(3), 257–293. Gitlin, A., Buendia, E., Crosland, K. and Doumbia, F. (Spring, 2003). The production of margin and center: Welcoming-unwelcoming of immigrant students. American Educational Research Journal, 40(1), 91–122. Goodwin, A. L. (2002). Teacher preparation and the education of immigrant children. Education and Urban Society, 34(2), 156–172. Graham, P. A. (1995). Assimilation, adjustment, access: An antiquarian view of American education. In D. Ravitch & M. A. Vinovskis (Eds.), Learning from the past: What history teaches us about school reform. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hamilton, R. (2004). Schools, teachers and the education of refugee children. In R. Hamilton & D. Moore (Eds.), Educational interventions for refugee children: Theoretical perspectives and implementing best practices (pp. 83–96). London: Routledge Falmer. Higham, J. (1955). Strangers in the land: Patterns of American nativism. New Brunswick, Canada: Rutgers University Press. Hirsch, E. D. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

190   N. MARINER, A. ANDERS, and J. LESTER Holt, M. F. (1978). The political crisis of the 1850s. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Howard, G.R. (1999). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teacher, multiracial schools. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Jordan, W. D. (1968). White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (2006). Toward a critical race theory of education. In A. D. Dixson & C. K. Rousseau (Eds.), Critical race theory in education: All God’s children got a song. New York, NY: Routledge and Taylor & Francis. Macedo, D., Dendrinos, B., & Gounari, P. (2003). The hegemony of English. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Mariner, N., Lester, J., Sprecher, K., & Anders, A. (2011). Relational knowledge production and the dynamics of difference: Exploring cross-cultural tensions in service learning through narrative. In N. Webster & T. Steward (Eds.), Exploring cultural dynamics and tensions within service-learning (pp. 63–80). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Nasaw, D. (1979). Schooled to order: A social history of public schooling the United States. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: United States Department of Education. Noblit, G. W., Flores, S. Y., & Murillo, E. G. (2004). Postcritical ethnography: An introduction. In G. W. Noblit, S. Y. Flores, & E. G. Murillo (Eds.), Postcritical ethnography: Reinscribing critique (pp. 1–52). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Office of Special Education Programs. (2003). Data analysis system (DANS), Table AA14 in vol. 2. Data are for the 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the outlying areas. Population data are July 1 estimates for 2001, released October 2003. Washington DC: Author. Pérez Huber, L. (2010). Using Latina/o critical race theory and racist nativism to explore intersectionality in the educational experiences of undocumented Chicana college students. Educational Foundations, 24(1), 77–96. Pérez Huber, L., Lopez, C. B., Malagon, M. C., Velez, V., & Solórzano, D. G. (2008). Getting beyond the “symptom,” acknowledging the disease: Theorizing racist nativism. Contemporary Justice Review, 11(1), 39–51. Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. (2001) Legacies: The story of the immigrant second generation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reese, W. J. (1995). Power and the promise of school reform: Grassroots movements during the Progressive Era. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Reese, W. J. (2002). Power and the promise of school reform: Grassroots movements during the progressive era. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Rosen, H. (2009). Terror in the heart of freedom: Citizenship, sexual violence, and the meaning of race in the postemancipation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Solórzano, D. G. (1998). Critical race theory, race and gender microaggressions, and the experience of Chicana and Chicano scholars. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 121–136.

The Politics of Nativism in U.S. Public Education    191 Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Symcox, L. (2002). Whose history: The struggle for national standards in American classrooms. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, friend of people of color: White investments in antiracism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (1), 7–29. Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. UNHCR. (2008). United Republic of Tanzania. UNHCR Global Report 2008. Valdes, F. (1996). Foreword: Latina/o ethnicities, critical race theory and post-identity politics in postmodern legal culture: From practices to possibilities. La Raza Law Journal, 9, 1–31. Voss-Hubbard, M. (2002). Beyond party: Cultures of antipartisanship in Northern politics before the Civil War. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Woodward, C. V. (1955). The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 10

Video of the Oppressed Insights Into Local Knowledge, Perspectives, and Interests With Youth Donna DeGennaro The University of Massachusetts Boston Rick Duque St. Cloud State University

Abstract Despite the fact that research indicates the importance of culturally relevant curriculum, educational experiences continue to be disconnected from the lives, communities, and ways of learning of underrepresented youth. This chapter unites the concept of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and video research methodologies to explore the ways in which learning can become more connected to the lives of youth. To do this, we offer an account of applying this methodology with youth in a rural mountain town in the Dominican Republic. We discuss the affordances and constraints of Video of the Oppressed throughout our reflection on this application. Within this account, we highlight the relevance of allowing learning to emerge with youth as they participate in directing the learning experience.

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 193–208 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Video of the Oppressed The concept of Video of the Oppressed emerged from conversations between my colleague and co-author Rick Duque and me (Donna DeGennaro). Rick and I both put portable digital technologies in the hands of local people situated in marginalized communities in order to allow them to tell their stories from their perspectives. The discussions regarding our work illuminated our increasing interest in bridging the affordances of new technologies with the tenets of critical pedagogy. We engaged in dialogue of such possibilities and reflected on the notable applications to the research we were envisioning of Paulo Freire’s (1970) historical work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We at times were enthused and at others grappled with the constraints and potentials that digital video afforded in mediating the innovative pedagogy we were planning. In the end, we applied this concept as a pilot study that I initiated in the Dominican Republic. The dynamic results of this initial research experience, combined with our conversations, led us to develop our methodological conceptualization, which we coined Video of the Oppressed. We define Video of the Oppressed as being grounded in the nonlinear tenets of pedagogy and, to certain extent, Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1993). We view this idea as an action research method that offers insights into how to connect the cultures and communities of youth. It aims to cultivate critical skills that engage and empower youth to assume a more active role in their education. In the process of conducting this kind of research, we have come to rely on digital video to bridge our awareness of cultural knowledge and skills as well as to foster collective discussions about social change. In this chapter, we aim to achieve three purposes. The first is to explicate the conception of Video of the Oppressed. In our discussions of this concept, we unpack the way in which this methodology merges Freire’s pedagogical vision with popular empowering video methodologies. Following this, we offer an account of enacting Video of the Oppressed with the youth in the pilot study in the Dominican Republic. We provide our utilization of this methodology and how it informed the work with this group. Finally, we discuss the affordances and constraints associated with its application within this narrative. Grounding Video of the Oppressed Video of the Oppressed is built on various research genres that use video to promote literacy (Goodman, 2003), invite participatory research (Braden, 1999; Johansson, 1999; Wheeler, 2009), and support ethnographic studies (Shrum, Duque, & Brown, 2005). When these methodological applications involve youth, video becomes a powerful tool for putting youth in the center

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of directing their own learning and in illuminating culture. These methods position youth as researchers of their own communities. This research affords us insight into their worlds in a way that helps us co-construct curriculum with them. Video of the Oppressed becomes an enabler in this process and is ultimately an intersection of video research models and critical pedagogy. Specifically, the methodology centers on how video supports (a) the importance of gaining insight into local and cultural knowledge and interests; (b) the significance of including analytical tools to assist youth in dissecting their social, cultural, and political realities; and (c) the principle of affording opportunities to youth to impact their social conditions. The Importance of Gaining Insight Into Local and Cultural Knowledge and Interests As an educational strategy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed begins with illustrating that learning must be connected to the social conditions of underprivileged youth. More explicitly, the educator must come to understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed (Freire, 1970). It is with this understanding that teachers can create community-inspired, problem-based learning designs rather than externally organized, scripted, linear, and disconnected lessons. Freire (1970) suggests that to begin the process teachers need to enter the communities where they will teach. In entering youth communities, teachers can ascertain the language that youth use and the context in which they use it. For example, teachers may note the everyday language words that are most prevalent in the community and how they are utilized in conversation. One way to capture and later reflect upon youth practices in the community is to videotape one’s observations. Another, perhaps more authentic option, is to ask youth to record aspects of their lives. Educators (Goodman, 2003) and researchers (Braden, 1999; Wheeler, 2009) have illustrated the affordances of having local people document their everyday lives. The videos that local people record become a way of capturing cultural practices as well as identifying community interests. Further, putting cameras in the hands of youth sends an implicit message that educators value their voice in the learning process. Through employing both alternatives, teachers and community members can capture events so that a broader array of experiences is documented. Having a set of videos at hand, teachers, youth, and community members have a set of experiences upon which they can later reflect. Teachers can use the video data as a way to identify patterns in language, social interactions, and cultural ways of knowing. They can review the stored data as many times as necessary in order to help them create culturally relevant curriculum. However, this interpretation should not happen in isola-

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tion. If teachers are the only ones to interpret the videos, then there is a risk of the findings being determined through his/her cultural lens. Thus, the curriculum might unconsciously become reflective of the teacher’s agenda. Freire (1970) reminds us that curriculum cannot be created in a way that imposes it’s own agenda; it must be in collaboration with those traditionally oppressed. To offset this risk, teachers work directly with youth and community members to analyze video data. Teachers, youth, and community members can co-interpret the data because of its potential to be simultaneously viewed and collectively interpreted. Rather than impress certain “truths” upon the learners and the community, video can facilitate communal conversations and get closer to the characteristics of community life. Viewing the videos enables all those engaged in the practice of learning to converse about what patterns they see and follow up with articulating their perspectives. Employing a constructivist approach (Guba & Lincoln, 1989), all participants are involved in asserting a perspective of community language, knowledge, interests, and concerns. Through obtaining an insider perspective and readings, participants collectively identify the focus of problembased educational activities that are grounded in authentic preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears of the local people. Video thus becomes a way of making visible the local knowledge, practices, and perspectives. What is employed is the first step of a video ethnography process. Briefly, video ethnography is a process that involves observing one’s natural surroundings to elicit insights and understandings of one’s social and cultural context. Placing the local actor in the role of observing and capturing events intends to position them as the expert. Through viewing and analyzing video footage, the actor also engages as reflective practitioner. The process offers a way for learners to document their worlds and to begin to participate in uncovering, seeing, and negotiating their realities. The video ethnography process subsequently requires that participants identify patterns in the video to find emerging themes, which begins to indicate what students want and need to learn. The affordances of technology-mediated discussions through a video ethnography process are not about the use of technology. They are about using the technology to make the visibility of thinking, acting, and being in the context of the enacted practices around the technologies. The combination of the documentation and the social conversations are both important components of seeing within the worlds of youth. Perhaps the most empowering aspect for youth is that they begin to see the knowledge and skills that they possess. Further, they see this knowledge as recognized and valued. Engaging youth in this process increases interest in learning, because youth are uncovering everyday occurrences and applying knowledge

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to situations that directly impact them. The implication is that youth become more connected, confident, and successful students. The Significance of Including Analytical Tools to Assist Youth in Dissecting Their Social, Cultural, and Political Realities One of the ultimate aims of critical pedagogy is to engage learners in critical consciousness (Freire, 1973). Critical pedagogues define this as providing opportunities for youth to question taken-for-granted norms. This second tenet of critical pedagogy is that learning engagements should provide opportunities for youth to become aware of the social, political, and economic situations that influence the conditions of their situations. Such an application could include unpacking the layered complexities of perpetual poverty, understanding the reasons for community-related energy crises, or unearthing the forces that determine educational goals. Regardless of the central topic, learners apply a variety of lenses to becoming more familiar with normative, and alternative, ways of looking at social life while developing critical learning skills. These perspectives come through dialogue, which is one of the most important aspects of fostering critical consciousness (Freire, 1973). While dialogue is certainly present in various forms of learning, adding the component of video creates an additional dimension to educational interchanges. As youth come together to talk around shared digital representations of social life, they participate in emergent ways of learning in which “individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge” (Wenger, 1998, p. 2). Following the concepts of participatory research and video ethnography, students have input in the kinds of things that they document, and they determine the patterns in the video clips. The unique affordance of video allows participants to assess, analyze, and deconstruct the worlds in which they live (Goodman, 2003). Investigations related to the use of video cameras and digital video in youth research show that video tools help youth get below the surface of their lives (Moletsane, Mitchell, Stuart, Walsh, & Taylor, 2008). They do this by identifying and questioning patterns, developing interview questions for people in their community, and suggesting research questions. The dialogue in these investigations moves the construction of knowledge toward articulating the social, political, and economic facets of local situations. Teachers are uncovering forms of participation, knowledge, and interests throughout the process. This emergent process generates the problem-solving curriculum that connects to youth’s lives. Teachers act as facilitators to guide youth toward discussing power relations and the connection between

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knowledge and power as it relates to taken-for-granted norms, values, beliefs, and perceptions of given situations. Viewing and (re)viewing the tapes becomes the problem-solving engagement. Learning becomes emergent and ever-changing as the process engages youth in a cycle of gathering data, analyzing situations, asking questions, and performing additional research. This recurring engagement affords youth an opportunity to more deeply examine the social and institutional structures that shape who they are. The Principle of Affording Opportunities to Youth to Impact Their Social Conditions The third tenet of critical pedagogy is for youth to become active agents in re-creating their social futures. In his introduction to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Richard Shaull reminds us that education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (p. 34)

The educational design must shape their world (Giroux, 2010). Research points to the fact that video tools assist youth in using media creations to envision new possible futures and generate new forms of social action (Chavez & Soep, 2005). Through research, youth “challenge the common-sense views of reality with which most individuals have grown so comfortable” (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1998, p. 2). The practice widens a vision of reality beyond what meets the eye, extends critical visions of the future, and offers the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. Youth subsequently create emancipatory knowledge (Wheeler, 2009). Highlighting social, cultural, and political norms and how they inform identity has the potential to enable youth to take on a new sense of empowerment (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1998). Youth voice becomes a more integral facet of learning as they help to shape the direction of their own learning—and application of that learning. The intent is to improve social conditions as they examine their own social practices, understand and reflect on those practices and situations, and envision and enact new possibilities for their future (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988). For the most part, discussions around social change focus on youth identifying and imaging how to change social ills. While this is an important aspect of social change, youth need to also concentrate on highlighting the positive aspects of their culture. Part of the process of social change is not only to adapt others’ ways of being in the world but also to accept the differ-

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ent ways of celebrating the simultaneity of difference (Appiah, 2006). Social transformation then must include the oppressed people’s attentiveness to representing the aspects of culture that make their community unique. It involves emphasizing the kinds of practices and cultures from which others can learn. In addition to inspiring efforts to change undesirable features within a community, video can be used then to present positive characteristics of local cultures that they desire to maintain. To summarize, Video of the Oppressed follows in the footsteps of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed tradition. In this section, we have brought forth the conversations and vision that materialized from integrating video-based research and critical pedagogy. We have suggested a way of thinking about Video of the Oppressed as well as developed a guide by which to implement it. Aside from adhering to the goals of critical pedagogy, Video of the Oppressed has an explicit aim of leveraging youth voice and involving youth in the direction of their own learning. Within this embryonic methodological and pedagogical concept, we next articulate one application of it. The following section describes a project that aimed to begin a process of employing each stage of Video of the Oppressed. Applying Video of the Oppressed Context The Video of the Oppressed framework informed my work in La Mina, a small town located on the North Shore of the Dominican Republic. The economic conditions in La Mina reflect the dire conditions of the Dominican as a whole. In short, only 50% of Dominicans have sufficient income to support basic needs; 34%–42% of the country’s population lives in poverty (OECD, 2008). Compounding this, children have few hours of education, with limited instructional materials and more often than not poor quality instruction (USAID, 2012). In La Mina, youth make up 45% of the population and almost all live below the poverty line. Furthermore, the majority of adult caregivers have no more than a 7th- or 8th-grade education. The implication for living in poverty with inadequate education is that Dominican youth have decreased prospects of developing into active and productive citizens, which in turn lessens their chances of overcoming economic and social abuse (USAID, 2012). I embarked on an educational application of Video of the Oppressed with nine middle school aged youth in the community of La Mina. These youth participated in activities organized by a local community center. At the Ruth Plaut Kindergarten and Community Center, directors Gideon and Eneyda arrange various programs for the youth. These include computer classes, Eng-

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lish lessons, music lessons, and community service projects. Volunteers from around the world come to assist with the facilitation of these activities. They open the program to any youth ages 11–18. The youth who chose to participate in this video project included eight girls and one boy. Their ages ranged between 11 and 16. All of the students are Spanish speakers. The project was not only a collaboration with the local youth, but also with the directors of the center. Gideon is a former medical doctor. He came to the Dominican Republic nearly 20 years ago. After several years of practicing as a doctor and living in La Mina, he decided to dedicate his time to the creation of the kindergarten and community center. Eneyda, his wife, also dedicates her time to the center. Eneyda is Dominican. She attended school in another town and completed her degree in Computer Science. Both felt that organizing the kindergarten and community center was a way to give back to a community that has openly welcomed them. In our initial discussions, Gideon articulated a vision that resonated with mine. He clearly supported the importance of allowing the children to immerse themselves in a practice in which the ideas and interests emerged from them. He was completely comfortable with the youth participating in establishing the direction of the project. Eneyda also viewed education as a process. She was dedicated more to the experiences throughout each step than she was in a polished and tightly run curriculum. Both their educational philosophies and insider views would be instrumental in the success of this project. I worked with the project directors to engage youth in a video research project that put video cameras in the hands of youth in order to identify their community through their perspective. The project was a multileveled collaboration that took place during six visits to the Dominic Republic over the span of approximately one year. The narrative below describes my work with the youth during February, May, and July of 2011. We began our work by having the youth tell me about themselves and their world. In the process, they began assisting in shaping the direction of the learning activities. I use the term “we” in the narrative below to include myself, the project directors, and eventually three volunteers who collaborated throughout this project. In each section, I connect the work to the three tenets of Video of the Oppressed, and I describe the activities as well as the challenges we faced during each phase of the initiative. February 2011: Setting the Foundations for Cultivating Self-Direction The implementation of the program officially began in February 2011. The concept itself was completely free-flowing. We asked the youth to take the cameras, go into their community, and start documenting what they

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were interested in. In this first stage, we employed practices that mostly allowed us to see inside the worlds of youth. To set the youth on their way, we first introduced them to the video cameras. They explored the functions of the Kodak Sport cameras, which had the capacity to capture both still and video images. The youth uncovered the facets and features by interacting and conferring with peers and consulting the written documentation (in Spanish). Engaging them in a problem-solving process was purposeful. It was a way to model active learning in the hands of youth and to empower them to learn through social interactions within a community of learners. In a matter of minutes, the youth began to experiment with recording by interviewing each other. Their recordings and interactions with each other gave us insight into these youth, their interactions, and their interests. How they conducted the interviews illustrated their connection to popular culture (acting as models) and how they emulated news stories and television. We witnessed news personalities and telenovela characters in our very presence. Their participation began to illustrate their language use, modes of participation, and personal and collective interests. After playing with the cameras, the program directors introduced the project. Since I had limited familiarity with the community and with Spanish, I relied on the directors to describe the vision for using the cameras. Gideon and Eneyda told the youth that they would use video cameras to capture their lives and later identify video clips that would assist them in creating a story about their community. They helped me encourage the youth to document anything that would represent their community. Together we worked to frame this by discussing that the audience of the films would be people who are unfamiliar with the town of La Mina. Our advice was for them to imagine that someone who did not know, or has never visited La Mina, was watching this film. We gave them the prompt: What would you capture to give this person a sense of your world? We informed the youth that what they captured was completely at their discretion. We answered questions and affirmed the suggestions they had, but we did not direct or dictate a list of “musts” in their repertoire of recordings. The youth organized themselves into three groups of three and began recording upon our departure. During this initial phase of the process, we gained a sense of how comfortable the youth were with such an open-ended process. We began to see that many were unfamiliar with self-directing. Both directors shared that in the youth’s educational system (like in many contexts), the youth are not asked to critically or creatively think nor are they asked to take part in identifying what they want to learn. The youth’s lack of practice with critical and creative thinking and self-initiating learning in some ways seemed to inhibit their confidence with what to record. For example, the youth asked for ap-

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proval on topics or ideas before they felt comfortable with recording the “right” things. This brought about our first obstacle to overcome. Despite the temptation to direct students about what to film, we reminded ourselves and the youth that they have the ability to struggle through and succeed in this unfamiliar role, and they bring knowledge and abilities that can assist them in this struggle. Gideon, Eneyda, and I worked with the youth to build their confidence, and we propelled the youth on their way to documenting their worlds. Between February and May, the youth took the video cameras to their homes and began documenting aspects of their lives. May 2010: Seeing the World Through Their Lives The goal of our second visit was to work directly with the youth to examine the video footage and begin identifying emerging themes. The intention was to identify themes that we would use to create their digital stories. Upon my arrival, I learned that the youth had recorded over 200 hours of video. The breadth of examples was exceptional. Before I had even seen the films, the directors offered two views on the quality of the recordings. One of the directors was concerned that these films were not good. The expressed view was that I would not be happy with what they captured, and I would need to provide more direction. The other director was pleased with the films and said they emulated a fair representation of the youth’s lives. At that moment, I began to reflect on Freire’s (1970) vision of reserving judgment about what is positioned as “good” or what is positioned as “knowledge.” The intention of these films is to begin unearthing language, practices, interests, and concerns within this community. I had an aim of seeing the lives of the youth from their perspective. The purpose of using the video was not to cast judgment, as such; it was important that the directors and I remained aware of the ways that we cast our own lenses on what was captured. This was essential in preventing ourselves from imposing our external values on local life. This important application of our role fostered our confidence in youth to tell their stories in a way that helped us see more of who they are and how they learn, which in turn enabled us to use this video as a tool for creating learning with the youth. I employed this vision when I began reviewing the videos with the youth. Gideon had organized the recordings into folders for each group. My strategy was to work with youth in their small groups to model this so that they could do it independently. With each group, I demonstrated how to view and catalogue the videos. Each group then revisited the videos and identified clips that were compelling to them. The compelling videos entered our collective discussion about discovering the emerging themes. The youth and I cooperatively decided that the overarching themes in each group were categorized

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into positive and challenging aspects of their community. Using a cognitive organizer, the youth returned to their groups and began to map the clips under these headings. At this stage, we were not engaged in deep conversations around their social, political, or economic realities. Instead, the youth were focused on dialogue to negotiate how the videos were representing their lives and what might be missing. During this time, we were documenting how they conferred with peers and organized information that they had. To begin developing their critical voice, I created a session on how meanings can potentially be constructed in visual representations. Eneyda assisted me in having this conversation. This is an important aspect of implementing Video of the Oppressed, because creating video is a political practice. Authors consciously create video in a way that positions a particular reality. It was important for youth to be aware of signals in their films, even if they weren’t conscious of them. Eneyda helped me to introduce how subject, sound, and lighting can influence the messages and mood in the video. With these concepts in mind, we shared the need to become conscious of how we frame what we film in order to provide a particular mood or message. Without trying to lead the youth into a way of seeing or representing their world, we shared technical language related to video making, such as the rule of thirds; close, medium, and long shots; and of headspace. Based upon these discussions, youth practiced and continued capturing video, paying attention to these elements. After the youth captured more video, we identified both older and newer clips that would become part of creating their digital stories. This process of identifying the video helped to externalize the ways youth are thinking and how they are constructing their stories. The social interactions around the video inform particular insights into their social and cultural realities and shed light on how youth connect disparate ideas that are present in their films. We discover what experiences youth draw on to talk about what they see, an important aspect of assessing cultural understandings and what is important to them. The most constraining aspect of these 10 days, however, was related to the need for deeper conversations around their video recordings that would lead to assisting the youth in making connections between the ideas they identified. My lack of language skills made supporting the analysis and connections impossible. Dialogue, the most crucial characteristic in critical pedagogy for making visible what and how youth know, was inhibited. Even with tools such as Google Translate, iPod Translator, and local translators, dialogue was challenging. The inability to scaffold was more than inhibiting. What materialized was a frustration and struggle about how to connect their stories and how to connect the pieces with other digital elements such as text and titles. This struggle penetrated our ongoing process. It also created various tensions across all participants. At the core of the struggle, the youth overtly ex-

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pressed frustrations by threatening to abandon the process. In response, the directors began calling for more externally created expectations and more detailed and traditional examples, because they inferred that the youth did not understand the complicated technical aspects of making their digital stories, and they were confused about how to tell a story. Yet, in my experience of working with nonlinear learning designs with youth, a struggle inevitably ensues. The digital storytelling process is reflexive; youth see the evolution of their stories on the computer while they are learning the technical skills to represent their ideas. It was evident from the video data that the youth adopted the technical knowledge to create these digital stories. It was, however, also true that making cohesively connected stories was a challenge. It was evident that the process was working and the technology was making this struggle visible, but more time was needed to allow the storytelling to emerge through the struggle. The directors offered considerable assistance in dissipating the tensions. We worked together to reorient the students (and ourselves) on how to move forward while still allowing the learning environment to unfold as an emergent process. As a result, the youth transcended this frustration and completed digital representations of both highlights and threats to their community. In a short 10 days, these youth had worked from raw video, to identifying themes, and creating powerful products. For example, the teams created movies about their carnival, the delinquency in the community, inadequate playgrounds, and lack of water. Given their lack of experience with critical thinking, self-directed learning, and video production, their digital stories were more than impressive. The final creations were not perfect productions. Instead, they were illustrations of the process that the youth had undergone. These productions are a window into the worlds of youth and aspects of their languages, culture, and practices. They showed their struggles with different facets of learning such as connecting a story and spelling correctly. These and other various artifacts (the graphic organizers, planning sheets, conversations, and digital stories) all unite to help us begin grounding learning in a meaningful way, connected to what they highlight in their community. A careful analysis of these artifacts will more clearly bring such groundings to the surface. For now, these initial processes with and around video provided insights into the affordances and constraints of implementing the Video of the Oppressed model to this point. July 2011: Youth-Driven Community Analysis and Representation The third part of this project occurred in July. I returned to La Mina, but this time with three Spanish-speaking volunteers. My goal was to have speak-

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ers who could assist with supporting dialogue to scaffold critical analysis. This 2-week session began with a review of the videos. The aim was to bring to light the conscious and unconscious messages in the youth’s current films. The volunteers and I began this next 2-week session with the youth. The eight youth described the program to the new volunteers. This was intentional. The purpose was to implicitly state that the youth were directing this process. The youth shared their perspective of the process, its purpose, and who the potential audience might be. The volunteers listened, asking clarifying questions and for more detailed explanations. Through each step of these 2 weeks, our group strove to allow youth to drive our daily decisions about what and how to engage them. From the early stages of reviewing films; brainstorming words that reflect the community; writing reflections, ideas, and interview questions; and deciphering themes for our production, youth were guiding us. Although we facilitated conversations, it was the youth who determined the themes that they would focus on for their collective video. What became visible was that poverty was a central term that infiltrated all the themes that emerged. Within this central theme were 10 additional themes. However, and again following the youth, three topics continued to surface as most salient for them. These were education, water, and garbage. Within these topics, youth needed to determine how they would represent them. Before discussing this, we reviewed the messages in their prior films. The conversations around the video assisted us in teasing out the messages couched within the videos. Selecting a few examples, we critiqued the power dynamics in the films. One clip was an interview with two of the youth standing over and interviewing an adult in the neighborhood. We illustrated how their proximity to the subject sent a message that the interviewee is subservient or intimidated. Another clip that we unpacked was a story recorded inside an impoverished home. The youth who described the setting spoke while leaving the members of the home mute. We brought to the surface that this inherently oppressed the subjects and did not give an authentic insider perspective of the community. We wanted to emphasize that the choices we make in the presentation of the films provide a message to the world. Moreover, we wanted to stress the concept of using video to empower the powerless. The video afforded a way for us to talk about power dynamics, not only in the video, but also in and around society. The visual cues around which we spoke enabled youth to grasp what are often complex and conceptual ideas. The youth continued to apply these strategies to their videos and their work with each other. This was particularly apparent when they were collectively selecting the clips to use in the final production. Their final production consisted of two parts. The first described their concerns and the second what they loved about their community. To rep-

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resent the challenges in the community, we began discussing their selected topics. Our conversations centered on different artifacts of our process and then their expressed viewpoints about education, water, and trash. We dissected taken-for-granted thoughts about each topic by challenging their normative ways of viewing each. For example, the youth viewed that the government was controlling their access, taking money for water that unpredictably or rarely came, and then not following through with promises. In their articulations, we challenged their normative notions, proposed alternative possible perspectives, and provoked what role they might take in changing this. These discussions led us to contemplating a variety of ways to represent the realities of each situation as seen from within the community. In the end, the youth decided to interview various people in the community and to create skits that portray something about each. The skits included a youth introduction to the issues in the community. The skits were dramatizations of local “truths,” which in turn provided insight into how they view each issue. In one skit, they acted out the fact that this moderated water access was problematic. Through their writing and their acting opportunities they could externalize the nuances of each topic. In order to begin constructing the second half of the movie, a few members sat on a bed and reflected on what they loved about La Mina. From these conversations, we interjected youth-recorded video showing these positive aspects. The group insisted on a single video to represent all of them. Thus, we collected their selections and drew on their guidance to complete a cohesive film. The resultant film intends to represent the view and voices of the youth in La Mina. The final cut does not represent the struggles around this process. What it does illustrate is who these youth are. It tells us about their knowledge, their concerns, and their joys. A popular view of youth in this community is that they are uneducated, naïve, and lazy. Yet the depth of knowledge about the complexities of their lives was increasingly evident during this last month. The discussions about and planning for their videos revealed that youth were aware that their elders were barely educated. They realized the importance of teaching their mothers to read, to encouraging their brothers to stay in school, and to keep an educational goal for themselves. They see the hardships faced by their families because of their lack of education. At the same time, they could articulate that to remove oneself from education was not always a choice. Jobs were scarce and families needed to take care of their children. Mothers worked hours away to maintain an economic existence. Sisters and brothers were needed at home to take care of the chores and younger siblings.

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Closing Remarks In the application summarized in this chapter, we unveiled the various considerations in operationalizing this innovative research design. Having successfully employed the method, we now envision additional applications that cultivate emergent learning environments built around the daily lives of youth. Through these digitally mediated structures of learning and expressions, we as researchers grow to understand the nuances of their dynamic worlds more clearly. We have also come to appreciate that the role of the video camera has multiple purposes in this process. For one, video is a powerful way to make thinking visible. It is a window into the minds of these youth that manifests the kinds of skills and knowledge they can bring to their educational setting. Next, it is a tool that assists us in reshaping the educational setting itself. In capturing and “talking around” video, we develop an emerging common language and a connection to community that makes possible more authentic educational experiences for those who participate. Another powerful aspect of video as a tool for learning is its ability to foster conversations. The program in La Mina helped to illustrate that kids in this community have a particular set of skills and personal knowledge that enabled them to document and analyze complex issues and problems within their own community. The success of the program suggests to us that Video of the Oppressed is a 21st-century medium that empowers students with the motivation and tools to self-reflect and narrate the story of their lives from their own perspective. In this way, video allows youth to appreciate the skills and knowledge they already have while helping them to critically think and question the world around them. Such questions can begin with What is my community? What are the challenges of my community? What the successes of the community? How do I ask questions about that? How do I create questions to interview people within in the community? And then how do I, as a community member, start to act differently to address those problems? Finally, in our application of Video of the Oppressed, we were convinced by how youth can direct and shape learning with us if given the chance and the right tools. This was of utmost importance to our research group since it was their community we were walking into. And it was their community we would be leaving in their hands when we departed. References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.

208   D. DeGENNARO and R. DUQUE Boal, A. (1993). Theater of the oppressed. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Braden, S. (1999). Using video for research and representation: Basic human needs and critical pedagogy. Journal of Educational Media, 24(2), 117–129. Chavez, V., & Soep, E. (2005). Youth radio and the pedagogy of collegiality. Harvard Educational Review, 75, 409–434. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York, NY: Seabury. Giroux, H. (2010, October 27). Lessons from Paulo Freire. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Lessons-From-PauloFreire/124910/ Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media: A critical guide to literacy, video production and social change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1989). Fourth generation evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Johansson, L. (1999). Participatory video and PRA: Acknowledging the politics of empowerment. Forests, Trees and People, Newsletter, 40/41, 21–23. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (1988). The action research planner. Geelong, Victoria, Australia: Deakin University Press. Moletsane, R., Mitchell, C., Stuart, J., Walsh, S., & Taylor, M. (2008, March 24–28). Ethical issues in using participatory video in addressing gender violence in and around schools: The challenges of representation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New York City. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). (2008). Education at a glance 2008: OECD indicators. Retrieved from http://www.oecd. org/edu/highereducationandadultlearning/educationataglance2008oecdindicators.htm Shrum, W., Duque, R., & Brown, T. (2005). Digital video as research practice: Methodology for the millennium. Journal of Research Practice, 1(1), Article M4. Steinberg, S. R., & Kincheloe, J. L. (1998). Students as researchers: Creating classrooms that matter. London, UK: Taylor & Francis. USAID. (2012). Dominican Republic: Education. Retrieved from http://transition.usaid.gov/dr/education.html Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems Thinker. Retrieved from http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/ cop/lss.shtml Wheeler, J. (2009). The life that we don’t want: Using participatory video in researching violence. IDS Bulletin, 40(3), 2–18.

Chapter 11

Qualitative Research for Antiracism A Feminist Approach Informed by Marxism Sarah Bell Bishop Grosseteste University Mike Cole Bishop Grosseteste University

Abstract In this chapter, we present a case study of a cross-generational oral history project that looks at the educational experiences of Gypsy women. We do this in order to address the issue of critical scholarship that views academic work and communities as interrelated sites of struggle for social justice. The study focuses on two key issues: the impacts of gender and racism. The methodology draws on both feminist and Marxist analysis.

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 209–224 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Introduction As Joe Kincheloe and Peter McLaren (2005) put it, Whereas traditional researchers see their task as the description, interpretation, or reanimation of a slice of reality, critical researchers often regard their work as a first step toward forms of political action that can redress the injustices found in the field site or constructed in the very act of research itself.

In this chapter, we argue that, for Marxists, research should aim to further knowledge of exploitation and oppression with the primary aim of liberating the exploited and the oppressed. Following Sudbury and Okazawa-Ray (2009), we advocate critical scholarship, which views the community and the academy as interlinked sites of struggle. We take as a case study, ongoing research on women from a Gypsy community in the UK. Having the poorest life chances of any ethnic group, the worst school results, being on the receiving end of racist bullying, and with families hounded from one district to another, discrimination against Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities has been described, as we point out below, by Trevor Phillips from the Commission for Racial Equality (now subsumed under the Equality and Human Rights Commission) as the last “respectable” form of racism (CRE, 2004). The research, which draws on the Marxist concept of racialization (e.g., Cole, 2011; Miles, 1993), eschews traditional research approaches that are often conducted by agencies of the local or national state and adopts a “Life History” approach (e.g., Goodson, 2005, 2006), involving one-to-one interviews by a female feminist researcher (Sarah Bell, one of the co-authors of this chapter), thus hopefully revealing hitherto undiscovered data related to the reproduction of racism in the UK. This case study is a cross-generational oral history project examining the educational experiences of women from one Gypsy community in England. It focuses on two key areas: the impact of gender and the significance of racism. The study is based on nine life-story interviews involving three generations of three families. Oral history data collection was chosen since the community has strong oral traditions alongside low literacy levels. The women taking part in the project all have contact with an alternative education provider for GRT communities in the East Midlands region of England. In addition to oral history data, a focus group was held to include more women’s stories, in a condensed format, from the same community.

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The GRT Community in the UK GRT communities have a long-standing presence in the UK, and in Europe more widely. The first recording of Gypsies in Europe was in Germany in 1407, with Scotland following in 1505, and England in 1514 (Liegeois & Gheorghe, 1995, p. 7). From their time of arrival in England, severe antiGypsy legislation was put in place (Mayall, 1995, p.7). In 1554, a ruling was introduced ordering all Egyptians1 to leave the country on pain of death; this was not repealed until 1783 (Cannon, 1989, p. 23). The historic position of the GRT community did not improve during the 20th or the early 21st centuries, with genocide in Nazi concentration camps, racist violence following the fall of communism, and the current persecution of Roma communities throughout Europe. For example, in 2008, Italy introduced fingerprinting of all Roma including children; in 2009, Roma in Belfast, Northern Ireland, were verbally abused and had their property damaged, forcing them to return to Romania;2 and in 2010, in France, Roma camps were destroyed and families repatriated to Romania. The Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller constituency in the UK consists of a number of diverse communities with different traditions and lifestyles, increasingly including a large population of settled families. The communities also have different legal standings, with English Gypsies and Irish Travellers recognized as having minority ethnic group status under the 1976 Race Relations Act. At present, there are no reliable statistics on the number of GRT people in the UK. The Department for Communities and Local Government (2006, p. 11) noted how hard it is to give an accurate figure for the size of the GRT communities: Estimates of the Gypsy and Traveller population in Britain vary widely—from 82,000 (Kenrick & Clark 1999) to 300,000 including those living in bricks and mortar housing (Liegeois 1987). No reliable figures exist for the number of Gypsies and Travellers who live in conventional housing.

Moreover, the historical and safety fears attached to declaring ethnicity for the GRT communities should not be underplayed. Communities avoid identification (O’Hanlon 2010, p. 244) because of insecurities, and are often unwilling to declare their ethnicity (OFSTED, 2003, p. 6)3 due to a fear of being excluded or discriminated against by settled communities (Myers & Bhopal, 2009). Nurden (2004, p. 30) describes the situation of the Roma throughout Europe as “Apartheid in the heart of Europe.” In addition, Trevor Phillips, as head of the then–Commission for Racial Equality, stated in 2004, “It is still considered acceptable to put up “No traveller” signs in pubs and shops and to make blatantly prejudiced remarks about Gypsies and travellers” (BBC News, 2004). In England, in 2011, there was an ongo-

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ing large-scale eviction of 400 Irish Travellers at Dale Farm following 10 years of legal battles over the right to live on greenbelt land that is owned by the community but does not have planning permission. This large-scale eviction attracted condemnation from national and international bodies, including the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which state the evictions would “disproportionately affect the lives of the Gypsy and traveller families, particularly women, children and older people.” “Race” and the Marxist Concept of Racialization In order to explain these historic and present-day examples of racism and exclusion from mainstream society, we adopt the Marxist concept of racialization. Racialization refers to the categorization of people (falsely) into distinct “races.” “Race” is a social construct. This is explained succinctly by Marxist geneticists Steven and Hilary Rose (2005; see also Darder & Torres, 2004, pp. 1–12, 25–34). As Rose and Rose note, in 1972, evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that 85% of human genetic diversity occurred within rather than between populations, and only 6%–10% of diversity is associated with the broadly defined “races.” As Rose and Rose (2005) explain, most of this difference is accounted for by the readily visible genetic variation of skin color, hair form, and so on. The everyday business of seeing and acknowledging such difference is not the same as the project of genetics. For genetics and, more importantly, for the prospect of treating genetic diseases, the difference is important, since humans differ in their susceptibility to particular diseases, and genetics can have something to say about this. However, beyond medicine, the use of the invocation of “race” is increasingly suspect. There has been a growing debate among geneticists about the utility of the term, and an entire issue of the influential journal Nature Reviews Genetics (Autumn 2004) was devoted to it. The geneticists agreed with most biological anthropologists that for human biology, the term “race” was an unhelpful leftover. Rose and Rose conclude that “whatever arbitrary boundaries one places on any population group for the purposes of genetic research, they do not match those of conventionally defined races.” For example, the DNA of native Britons contains traces of multiple waves of occupiers and migrants. “Race,” as a scientific concept, Rose and Rose conclude, “is well past its sell-by date.” For these reasons, we would argue that “race” should be put in quotation marks whenever one needs to refer to it. The popular political slogan, “one race the human race,” would thus appear to be accurate. The Marxist concept of racialization is distinct from other interpretations of racialization in that it purports that in order to understand and combat

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racism, we must relate racism and racialization to historical, economic, and political factors. Specifically, the Marxist concept of racialization makes the connection between racism and capitalist modes of production as well as making links to patterns of migration that are in themselves determined by economic and political dynamics. Thus, the concept is able to relate to these factors; namely, the real material contexts of struggle. Robert Miles (1993, pp. 50–52) has defined racialization as an ideological process, in which people are categorized falsely into the scientifically defunct notion of distinct “races.” Racialization, like racism, is socially constructed. In Miles’ (1989, p. 75) words, racialization refers to “those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics.” Elsewhere in the same book, Miles (p. 79) has added, “[cultural characteristics] in such a way as to define and construct [my emphasis] differentiated social collectivities.” “The process of racialization,” Miles states, “cannot be adequately understood without a conception of, and explanation for the complex interplay of different modes of production and, in particular, of the social relations necessarily established in the course of material production” (p. 7). It is this articulation with modes of production and with the ideological and the cultural that makes Miles’ concept of racialization inherently Marxist. Racialization and “Common Sense” For Marxists, any discourse is a product of the society in which it is formulated. In other words, “our thoughts are the reflection of political, social and economic conflicts and racist discourses are no exception” (Camara, 2002, p. 88). Dominant discourses tend to directly reflect the interests of the ruling class rather than “the general public.” The way in which popular consciousness is interpellated by specters of racialized “others” is via “common sense.” “Common sense” is generally used to denote a down-to-earth “good sense” and is thought to represent the distilled truths of centuries of practical experience, so that to say an idea or practice is “only common sense” is to claim precedence over the arguments of Leftist intellectuals and, in effect, to foreclose discussion (Lawrence, 1982, p. 48). As Diana Coben (2002, p. 285) has noted, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between good sense and common sense “has been revealed as multifaceted and complex.” For common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the “folklore” of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental characteristic is that it is . . . fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential. (Gramsci, 1978, p. 419)

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Good sense, on the other hand, for Gramsci (1978), is exemplified by Marxism. As Coben (1999, p. 206) has argued, good sense, for Gramsci, “may be created out of common sense through an educative Marxist politics.” Gramsci believed that ‘“everyone’ is a philosopher, and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing activity” (Gramsci, 1978, pp. 330–31). Gramsci also believed that “all men are intellectuals . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” (1978, p. 9). Extending and enacting these insights to the whole of humankind (not just men!) forms the basis of some of the core values that inform Marxist praxis. The Racialization of the GRT Communities The position of Gypsies and Travellers in the UK is highlighted in a report by the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (2010). In addition, a literature review commissioned by the Equalities and Human Right Commission focused on the inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities. It highlighted that “one core theme which arises across all topics is the pervasive and corrosive impact of experiencing racism and discrimination throughout an entire lifespan and in employment, social and public contexts” (Cemlyn, Greenfields, Burnett, Matthews, & Whitwell, 2009). Racialization and racism is promulgated via the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) (such as the police) and the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) (Althusser, 1971). With respect to the police, at the aforementioned eviction of Dale Farm, police used Tasers on unarmed protesters upon storming the site (Robinson, 2011). One of the Travellers, described the experience as “terrifying.” Another returned from hospital in a wheelchair with a fractured spine, stating, “A police officer pushed me against a wall. Then he got me on the ground. He kept kicking me and kicking me. Two officers dragged me along the ground, even though I kept saying I was in pain” (Robinson, 2011). At times, the police operation was absurd, with heavily armed riot police marching in military formation around the site for no apparent reason (Robinson, 2011). With respect to the political and communications ISAs, certain newspapers ceaselessly racialize GRT communities. The right-wing tabloid, The Sun, both captures and creates working-class racism and racialization. In other words, it refers to GRT communities as if they belong to a distinct “race” with distinct characteristics. In its March 24, 2008, edition, for example, the front page headlines declared, “Gypsy Hell for Tessa.” The article was referring to the fact that 64 Travellers had “set up camp just yards from the country home of the then–Government Minister Tessa Jowell” (p. 1).

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Above the headline was the caption, “Easter Holiday Invasion.” Other descriptors included “30 caravans swarmed on to the . . . field” (p. 1); “Gypsy Nightmare”; “crafty gypsies” (p. 4); “these families” (p. 8). Carole Malone, a columnist for the Sunday paper The News of the World, referred to “gypsies and travellers” in the following terms: “none of these people have jobs or pay tax and most of them contribute little or nothing to society”; “travellers are constantly moving and don’t live ordered lives like the rest of us”; “and why do these armies of people who descend on peaceful villages all over Britain bringing chaos and distress get special treatment?”; “It’s not our fault they choose not to live in a house—although they seem fairly adept at knocking up jerry-built dwellings on land that doesn’t belong to them”; “and how come they’re allowed to break the law, particularly planning laws, with impunity, yet the minute one of us does 35mph in a 30 limit we get clobbered?” The interpellation concludes, “It’s not fair. It’s not right” (The News of the World, June 21, 2009). A final example of the ongoing tirade against the Gypsy Roma and Traveller communities occurred at the time of this writing. Andy Crick claimed in The Sun (August 27, 2010, p. 34) that Irish Travellers wishing to see the Pope had “thrown [his visit] into turmoil amid fears hordes of gipsies will gatecrash a mass.” He went to point out that “waves” had already arrived. When analyzing the position of the GRT communities in relation to racialization and racism, it is essential to identify the geographical situation they occupy. Historically, the communities have been part of rural society, and this remains the case. However, movement has been made toward the economies of urban locations in which the communities tend to live in rundown estates or in areas deemed unacceptable by settled communities (near sewage works, major roads, and refuse sites). The relationship between geography and rurality is significant; the travelling community has a long history of moving around the country and undertaking seasonal agricultural work. This pattern of life changed dramatically after the Second World War when farming became increasingly mechanized; however the traditional stopping places and links with the community, for instance parish churches, remain in rural areas. Holloway (2007) comments on the way in which the settled communities use their perceptions of “true Gypsies” and “Whiteness” to serve their purposes when classifying GRT communities as White, not a minority ethnic community, and “not true” Gypsies, thus depriving them of their rights as a minority ethnic community. In order to understand the racist experiences of GRT communities, it is essential to move away from a simplistic colorcoded understanding of the concept. One of us (Cole, 2009) has identified a number of historical and contemporary forms of non-color-coded-racism and hybridist racism. In addition to anti-GRT racism, these include antisemitism, xeno-racism, anti-asylum-seeker racism, and Islamophobia.

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GRT Communities, Racism, and Education Since 1997, there has been an explosion in research regarding GRT underachievement in education. It is now 44 years since Plowden recognized the problem and 29 years since the Swann Report. It is troubling that key issues highlighted so long ago continue to cause concern. There has been an improvement in attendance, especially at primary school, but at secondary-level attendance, self-exclusion and formal exclusion are all concerns. The then–Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) (2008) reported this in connection to the impact of racist bullying. Attendance still provides interesting findings. In a 6-year study in Scotland, Elizabeth Jordan (2001) identified that the expected link between being settled and increased school attendance was not established. This is significant since previously it had always been assumed that nonattendance and low educational outcomes were related to not being in a settled home environment. On the contrary, this research showed that educational outcomes are based on issues much wider than housing alone. Racism is clearly one of these. Attainment is now monitored through the Annual School Census (ASC),4 with data collected by ethnicity through self-identification. Findings from those who disclose their GRT status are causing great concern. Evidence from Hill et al. (2010, p. 76) shows the dramatic underachievement of the GRT communities, with just over 10% achieving satisfactory results. Cemlyn et al. (2009) have shown that pupils’ educational standards are not improving. The data for 2003 through 2007 show that GRT communities are the only groups with a decrease in attainment at Key Stage 4.5 Racialization and racism are a reality for GRT pupils in education. Evidence suggests that they experience racism both from other pupils and more worryingly, from some teachers (Cemlyn et al., 2009; DCSF, 2008; OFSTED, 1996). GRT pupils’ experience of racism in schools is recognized by the DCSF, who note that “too many Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils in schools have experienced racist abuse and other forms of bullying” (2008, p. 32). In their report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Cemlyn et al. (2009) take this further, arguing that the experiences of racism impact on their rights as members of minority cultural groups: Instead of conditions to “maintain and develop their culture, and to preserve essential aspects of their identity” (article 5), Gypsy and Traveller children in school face the invidious choice of denying and hiding their identity, or experiencing bullying, racism and exclusion because of their identity. (p. 108)

This shows the immense impact that racism can have on the GRT community. It is not just individual isolated experiences of racism. Racism toward GRT communities is so entrenched that their ability to maintain and devel-

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op their cultures is being eroded. OFSTED (1996, p. 6) highlights that it is at secondary school that the experiences of racist bullying are most marked; this is also the stage that the majority of GRT pupils withdraw from school. Lloyd and Stead (2001, p. 372) stress that schools need to address racist bullying, but in order to do this, they need to understand ethnocentrism. They also need to be aware of how often this occurs in their schools and how racist bullying impacts attendance and attitudes toward school. This can effect generations of GRT communities. The Family in GRT Communities In order to ensure that the research being undertaken with the communities would be a productive exercise to all involved, it was essential to make sure the methods used fit with community expectations of personal conduct and engaged with the individuals within families who made educational decisions. The role of family, women’s modesty, and their primacy in educational decision making necessitated a focus on women. Family is extremely important within GRT communities; extended family ties are normally close, and the reputation of the wider family is an important consideration of all family members. Clarke and Greenfields (2006, p. 41) highlight the significance of family when they state that “children and the elders remain central to Gypsy and Traveller community life. Any individual who failed to consider and take account of the needs of the wider family would be held to be in breach of fundamental social codes.” The family set-up can generally be described as “traditional,” providing care to the community from “cradle to grave,” with families rather than the state providing for the needs of all in the community. As such, women take on the traditional caring roles within GRT communities, which includes older children caring for siblings. Bhopal notes the impact of the gender roles on her work with GRT families on education. Within her research, she nearly always spoke to the mothers, who highlighted that “the health, education and homemaker role is the responsibility of women” (Bhopal, 2010, p. 192). The sexual behavior of women impacts individuals and on wider family respect, and women are expected to behave according to certain moral standards. For example, there is an expectation that they will be virgins upon marriage, remain faithful throughout marriage, not get divorced, and avoid being alone with men outside of the family (Okely 1983, p. 203). Women’s morality and family expectations impact young women who are legally still required to be in full-time education6 in a number of ways: the sexualized behavior that is considered as “normal” in UK schools; physical education in mixed groups and showering facilities; sex and rela-

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tionship education; domestic and caring duties at home; the irrelevance of the curriculum to the anticipated life course. Case Study The methods chosen for this research project were considered in great detail in relation to an increased understanding of the Gypsy community. The methods needed to be able to elicit the educational experiences of the community.7 There was also a need to ensure that the Gypsy women would be able to provide their “truth/evidence” to the project, taking into account the literacy levels of the community and the reluctance to trust Gorgio.8 The methods opted for were congruent with feminist antiracist research, therefore an oral history project was chosen. This methodology would allow the participants’ voices to penetrate the research, rather than “outsider” concepts of gypsy education, to form the basis of the project. The overarching method to gain knowledge is through a cross-generational oral history project. The significance of the multigenerational approach is based on an understanding that society, communities, and families have patterns of experience, and that collecting one generation’s story in isolation would cut off opportunities to identify patterns. The project provides detailed life histories, the overarching methodological tool being oral history. The techniques involved include repeated in-depth interviews, triangulated with focus groups and fishbone diagrams.9 To ensure an absence of colonialism (going into the field, taking what is deemed of value in the mainstream communities, and leaving and using as deemed fit), the project will involve negotiation at the start and end of the process. This will be with the gatekeeper, that is to say, the person who helps gain access to the community, and the families, and will no doubt shape the outcomes of the research.10 Do Oral History Projects Work for Feminist Antiracist Researchers? The choice to use oral histories as the methodological tool for the project was mainly because of the approach’s roots in recording the history of individuals previously ignored when recording the past. This includes workingclass populations, women, and minority communities. These roots provide a theoretical backdrop to the research. Oral history has a strong affinity with feminist researchers since it allows women to speak for themselves and to tell the realities of their lives in their own words. This is precisely the reason why the method is appropriate to collate the realities of indi-

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viduals disadvantaged by social class, gender, “race,” disability, and other forms of oppression. It promotes their stories as of equal significance to traditional historical records, which tend to be more concerned with advantaged groups. It facilitates the uncovering of different historical realities. Anderson, Armitage, Jack, and Wittner (1990, p. 101) state they are able to explore emotional and subjective thoughts in addition to facts and activities. Individuals can also be asked what they mean during the interview to ensure understandings are correct, which is not the case in a strict interview schedule. Amoah (1997, p. 85) goes as far as to argue that narrative “is the method of Black Feminist Theory,” arguing that it allows women and people of color to reclaim their voices and oppressed people to create their own sphere of theorized existence, thereby removing them from marginalization. These are exactly the reasons for using oral history methods with women from GRT communities, particularly the aim of gaining a detailed understanding of their emotional experiences. In so doing, “Black Feminist Theory” is being extended to include White women, who, despite being White, are racialized and subject to non-color-coded racism. The in-depth, multistaged oral history interview employed in the study is part of the feminist paradigm (Edwards 1990, p. 479; Oakley, 1981, p. 41; Riessman, 1987), but it is also informed by Marxism and takes into account Edwards’ comments that racism impacts on the interview relationship between a White researcher and interviewees of a different ethnic group. In early feminist literature relating to interviewing, the “scientific and masculine approach” that aims for objectivity, detachment, and hierarchy is questioned (Oakley, 1981, p. 38), and arguments are made for shifting the focus to hearing women’s lives through their own voices (Oakley, 1981, p. 48). This is a principle reason for conducting Life Stories and Life Histories in this study. Although we agree with Oakley (1981) that women interviewing women develop a “bond,” we believe that the “bond” is only so strong. If not considered prior to the interviews, it can be broken by other differences of age, ethnicity, and social class. The impact of racism during interviews is highlighted by Errol Lawrence (1982, pp. 133–134), who, writing at a time when “Black” was often used as an all-encompassing term in the UK, argues that the relationship between White researchers and Black (to which we would add “and other racialized groups”) is structured by racism. Edwards (1990) takes this further: Racial differences enter into the consciousness of individuals and groups, and determine their conceptions of themselves and others as well as their status in the community. This has implications for the process of the research—the actual carrying out of the research—as well as implications for the findings of any research. (pp. 481–482)

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These are central issues for antiracist feminist research. It is important that participants gain an understanding of the researcher as an individual. This is achieved by conducting multiple interviews to develop a “friendly stranger” relationship to help ensure that the information disclosed is as reliable as possible. In this research, focus groups enable the study to engage with women in a more informal manner, to hear through their voices and the communities’ ideas and concerns, with the aim of reducing the effect of the exploitative researcher. Feminist and antiracist researchers have used focus groups as an empowering data collection method (Pollack, 2003; Staveren, 1997; Wilkinson, 2004). According to Wilkinson (2004, p. 283), they “avoid the problems of artificiality, decontextualization, and exploitative power relations” and can play a specific role in working with underrepresented social groups. Staveren (1997, p. 13) stresses that the findings of focus groups give “voice to women’s ideas and concerns.” Focus groups have been used alongside Life History research; for example, Pollack (2003) combined the methods to investigate issues of gender, “race,” and power. She argues that this provided a deeper level of understanding but needs supplementing with wider societal issues. “The individual focus of life history interviews allows personal and intimate life details to be discussed, these interviews are less useful for examining structural, systemic, and ideological practices that shape human experience” (Pollack, 2003, p. 462). It is for this reason that the research on Gypsy women needs to be informed by Marxism since, as noted earlier, GRT communities are racialized by both the RSAs and the ISAs. Specifically, the research aims to identify issues that affect GRT women’s education. Although the detail of personal experience is paramount, the study also aims to examine community experiences, which are wider than individual stories using both focus groups and secondary data to gain insight into the structural, systemic, and ideological practices that impact on GRT women. Oral history data collection makes it possible to position the women’s stories within a wider context, ensuring that the key areas of class, gender, and “race” can all be engaged with systematically. In order to hear authentic and truthful voices, it is important to gain access via an individual who is not linked to the formal education system. However, the sponsors of the project were keen to gain access via the Traveller Education Service (TES).11 This was problematic to the study. However, a solution was found when a community-focused nongovernmental Gypsy education group was identified, which would be happy to sponsor the project and that had a history of being a partner with the sponsor. The marginality of the women who will take part in this research study will impact on a number of ethical considerations, from access to anonymity to the outcomes of the research findings. In undertaking this research, it is essential to take heed of Hurley’s concerns relating to researching marginalized communities. Practices that assume marginality can reproduce

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social deficit accounts of the groups being researched, and in the process, reinforce social marginalization of those groups (Hurley, 2007, p. 160). As this research project sets out with social justice at its core, it is essential to understand the full ethical considerations and the long-term impacts that findings can have on communities; and not just during the research process In this chapter, we have attempted to show how important researcher positioning is to the design of a study. We have also demonstrated how the Marxist concept of racialization can facilitate an understanding of racism directed at racialized groups: in this research, non-color-coded racialized groups. The oral history design of this project provides the opportunity to gain access to the truth the women wish to share at a level of detail that will provide insight into their experiences. In addition, the methods used are in line with critical research as outlined by the quote from Kincheloe and McLaren at the beginning of this chapter, namely, research that leads to political action to redress injustice. Through oral history, this project enables access to the multiple levels of oppression (“race,” gender, and social class), which are experienced by one Gypsy community in the East Midlands of the UK. Notes 1. Initially, Gypsies were thought to have come from Egypt and as such, were known as Egyptians. 2. The racist experiences of the Roma community in Belfast are, at the time of writing, being repeated; see www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/51analysis/14940-roma-racism-belfast-sdlp-belfast 3. OFSTED is the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Its inspectors report directly to the UK Parliament and claim to be independent and impartial. They inspect and regulate services that care for children and young people, and those providing education and skills for learners of all ages. 4. Annual School Census is collated annually and includes information on pupils by age, gender, free school meal eligibility, ethnicity, first language, and “gifted” and “talented” status. 5. Key Stage 4 (KS4) is the last age group of compulsory education in the UK aged 14–16, which ends with formal examinations, GCSEs; compulsory education is divided into 5 sections (Early Years, 3–5; KS1, 5–7; KS2, 7–11; KS3, 11–14; and KS4, 14–16) 6. The mandatory school leaving age in the UK is currently 16. 7. The initial proposed study would have been statistical in nature with interviews with experts, teachers, Traveller education services but fundamentally not the community themselves; it came from a very educationalist angle, which was representative of my status as a teacher when designing the project. 8. This is a word used by the Gypsy community for non-Gypsies.

222    S. BELL and M. COLE 9. The fishbone diagrams being used provide a visual word prompt to aide discussion. The fishbone diagram identifies many possible causes for an effect or problem. It can be used to structure a brainstorming session. It immediately sorts ideas into useful categories (Tague, 2004, pp. 247–249). 10. At present, work is being undertaken with the gatekeeper to gain funding to undertake a wider oral history project which would include training young people to undertake oral history with their own family members. 11. The Traveller Education Service are a Local Authority service made up of Teachers and Teaching Assistants. At present the TES is being cut dramatically across the UK.

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Qualitative Research for Antiracism    223 Cole, M. (2009). A plethora of “suitable enemies”: British racism at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32, 1671–1685. Cole, M. (2011). Racism and education in the U.K and the U.S: Towards a socialist alternative, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). (2004). Gypsies and Travellers: A strategy for the CRE, 2004–2007. London, UK: Commission for Racial Equality. Darder, A., & Torres, R. D. (2004). After race: Racism after multiculturalism. New York, NY: NYU Press Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCFS). (2008). The inclusion of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children and young people. Nottingham, UK: DFES. Department for Communities and Local Government. (2006). Gypsies and Travellers: Facts and figures. London, UK: Department for Communities and Local Government Edwards, R. (1990). Connecting method and epistemology: A White woman interviewing Black women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 13, 477–490. European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance. (2010). ECRI report on the United Kingdom. Brussels, Belgium: Council of Europe. Goodson, I. (2005). Learning, curriculum and life politics. London, UK: Routledge Goodson, I. (2006). The rise of the life narrative. Teacher Education Quarterly, 33, 7. Retrieved from http://140.234.17.9:8080/EPSessionID=a3f8aae7622cab85d f7e9f763cfa53c/EPHos=find.galegroup.com/EPPath/gtx/retrieve.do?conte ntSet=IACDocumentsandresultListType=RESULT_LISTandqrySerId=Locale %28en%2C%2C%293AFQE%3D%28au%2CNone%2C12%29ivor+goodson% 24andsgHitCountType=NonandinPS=trueandsort=DateDescendandsearchTy pe=AdvancedSearchFormandtabID=T002prodId=ITOFandsearchId=R1andc urrentPosition=2anduserGroupName=bgcanddocId=A1589119anddocType= IAC Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hill, J., Brewer, M., Jenkins S., Lister, R., Lupton, R., Machin, S. . . . , Riddel, S. (2010). An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel. Retrieved from http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cr/CASEreport60.pdf Holloway, S. L. (2007). Burning issues: Whiteness, rurality and the politics of difference. Geoforum, 38, 7–20. Hurley, M. (2007). Who’s on whose margins? In M. Pitts & A. Smith (Eds.), Researching the margins: Strategies for ethical and rigorous research with marginalised communities. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Jordan, E. (2001). Exclusion of Travellers in state schools. Educational Research, 43(2) 117–132. Kincheloe, J. L., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In Y. S. Lincoln & N. K. Denzin (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 303–342). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lawrence, E. (1982). In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty: Sociology and Black “pathology.” In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Eds.), The empire strikes back: Race and racism in 1970s Britain (pp. 95–142). London, UK: Hutchinson. Liegeois, J.-P., & Gheorghe, N. (1995). Roma/Gypsies: A European minority. London, UK: Minority Rights Group International.

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About the Contributors

Jorgeline Abbate-Vaughn is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Faith Agostinone-Wilson is associate professor of education at George Williams College of Aurora University. She is the author of Marxism and Education Beyond Identity: Sexuality and Schooling and has several articles published in  the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies,  Radical Notes, and  Public Resistance. A member of the Rouge Forum educational collective, Faith lives in Waukegan, Illinois, and her research interests include education policy, sexuality, and counter-hegemonic research methodologies. Currently she is writing a book focusing on Marxist research methods, to be published by Peter Lang as part of their Critical Qualitative Research series. Jeannette Alarcon is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the Cultural Studies in Education program. Her current lines of inquiry include sociohistorical aspects of urban education, understanding the ways in which teachers develop professional identity and exploring culture and identity within urban school settings. Allison Daniel Anders is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina. She teaches qualitative research methodologies, social justice and education, and sociology of education. She studies the experiences of targeted youth in K–16 public education settings.

Challenging Status Quo Retrenchment, pages 225–230 Copyright © 2013 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Sarah Bell is a doctoral student at Bishop Grossetest University, Lincoln, UK, where she is undertaking PhD research exploring the educational experiences of women from the Gypsy community. She undertook undergraduate studies at Birmingham University in Race and Ethnic Studies prior to employment with the National Assembly for Wales, providing support to the Equalities Committees Policy Review with respect to service provision to Gypsies and Travellers. A qualified Secondary Citizenship teacher, she is currently volunteering for an Oral History Project “Children of The Croft,” which is examining pioneering housing support offered by a local charity in Nottingham during the 1960s and 1970s to enable lone mothers to make positive choices for the futures of their babies. Emmet Campos is an educational researcher with the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) at the University of Texas at Austin. Emmet earned a PhD in Cultural Studies in Education/Curriculum and Instruction at UT Austin, where he focused on examining critical linkages between student learning, pedagogy, and identity formation in various educational contexts. Mike Cole is emeritus research professor in Education and Equality at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, UK. He has written extensively on equality issues. Recent books include Marxism and Educational Theory: Origins and Issues (Routledge, 2008); Critical Race Theory and Education: A Marxist Response (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Equality in the Secondary School: Promoting Good Practice Across the Curriculum (Continuum, 2011); Racism and Education in the U.K. and the U.S: Towards a Socialist Alternative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Education, Equality and Human Rights: Issues of Gender, “Race,” Sexuality, Disability and Social Class, 3rd Ed. (Routledge, 2011). Noah De Lissovoy is assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on critical and emancipatory approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and cultural studies. He is the author of Power, Crisis, and Education for Liberation: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy (Palgrave Macmillan). His work has appeared in a number of publications, including the Harvard Educational Review, Curriculum Inquiry, Race Ethnicity and Education, Discourse, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and the Journal of Education Policy. Donna DeGennaro is a professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research draws on theories from cultural sociology and critical pedagogy to examine the interrelationship between culture, history, and social interactions and how they inform emergent learning designs. She also coordinates a program in Technology, Learn-

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ing, and Leadership. This is an innovative program that invites teachers to rethink the organization of teaching and learning. Ricardo B. Duque, PhD. is an Assistant Professor at St. Cloud State University in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. For the past decade, he has been employing digital video in his research documenting the global impact of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Monique Guishard is an instructor of psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Bronx Community College Campus and a doctoral candidate in the Social-Personality Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate and University Center. Her participatory action research with young people has explored parent activist and youth researchers’ critical consciousness development in the context of community organizing and conducting research on the academic resource and achievement gap. Monique’s dissertation research focuses on understanding how the promises and commitments to democratic inquiry that are implicit in participatory research can inform ethical analysis of social research. Her writing has appeared in the Urban Review, The Harvard Family Research Digest, and the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation. Carl E. James works in youth studies, particularly examining issues pertaining to educational and occupational access and equity for marginalized and immigrant youth. He holds a PhD in Sociology and is currently the Director of the York Centre for Education and Community (YCEC) at York University, Toronto, Canada. James teaches in the Faculty of Education and in the Graduate Program in Sociology. Tricia M. Kress is assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in the Leadership in Urban Schools doctoral program. She received her PhD in urban education from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her areas of expertise are critical pedagogy, ethnography, and sociocultural perspectives on education. She has published in numerous educational volumes and journals. Of note is her recent work as a guest editor of a special edition of The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, which focused on using critical research for educational and social change, and her recently published textbook, Critical Praxis Research: Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers, which applies critical pedagogy to research methods in order to bridge the scholar-practitioner divide that is so often prevalent in typical research methodologies. Robert Lake is associate professor at Georgia Southern University and teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in multicultural education from both a local and global perspective. He is the editor of Dear

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Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation with Maxine Greene, published by Teachers College Press and author of Vygotsky on Education in the Peter Lang Primer Series. Jessica Nina Lester is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at Washington State University. She teaches courses focused on learning theories, human development and classroom assessment. Her research interests include qualitative methodologies, critical orientations to human learning and development, and the educational experiences of youth in K–12 settings. Curry Malott is assistant professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are wide-raging, focusing most recently on the history of education from a Marxist perspective. He has published and presented in many areas of critical pedagogy from countercultures, gender justice, Whiteness, cognition, neoliberalism, leadership, to neocolonialism and Native North America. All of his work is connected by the common goal of contributing to the emergence of a postcapitalist global society. Nicholas S. Mariner is an Instructor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina. He teaches courses in educational foundations. His research interests are the history of public education in the United States and historical research methodologies including oral history and historical ethnography. Carola Mick works as assistant professor (Maître de conférences) in general linguistics at the University Paris Sorbonne Cité (Paris V, France). She holds a PhD in applied and sociolinguistics of romance languages (Spanish, French) of the University of Mannheim (Germany) and concluded a 4-year lasting postdoc position in educational sciences at the University of Luxembourg. The data from “Project B” that her chapter is based on are part of a 2-year ethnographic research project in a Luxembourgish primary school that has been financed by the CORE programme of the National Research Fund of Luxembourg (C09/ID/05). This project led, among others, to the publication of a special issue on “Bottom-up approaches to agency in education” in EERJ (10[4]). Patricia Paugh was a K–12 teacher for 20 years, and is currently an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests include school–university research partnerships, equitable access to academic literacy for students in linguistically and culturally diverse communities, critical literacy, and the value of practitioner research in teachers’ professional development.

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Brad J. Porfilio is assistant professor of education at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, where he conducts research and teaches doctoral students to become critical scholars, social advocates, and multicultural educators. He has been an active member of AESA since 2003. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and conference papers in the field of education. Dr. Porfilio earned his PhD in sociology of education in 2005 at the University at Buffalo. Geoff Rose is in his sixth year at the Dever-McCormack K–8 School where he is currently teaching 4th grade. Geoff has been an active teacher leader throughout his tenure at the school and has been significantly involved in his school’s turnaround process. Geoff has a B.A. in Elementary Education and Human Development from Boston College, a M.Ed. in Moderate Special Needs from Boston College, and a M.Ed in Educational Leadership at BC. Christina Siry is associate professor in educational sciences at the University of Luxembourg, where she teaches in the area of science education. Her research foci include the use of participatory approaches for working together with teachers and students around the learning of science at the primary school level. The data from “Project A” in her chapter were gathered in the context of the CODISCILE-A research project, funded by the University of Luxembourg, which was active from 2008 to 2011, and in which she was a postdoctoral researcher. Leanne Taylor holds a PhD in Education and is currently an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University. Her research, rooted in social justice and equity, explores the social construction of racialized identities, particularly mixed-race identities, the use of digital media in social justice education, and marginalized students’ access to and experiences in postsecondary education. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on youth development and sociocultural perspectives in education and has taught courses on educational law and ethics, which include the effects of school policies and teacher conduct on student experiences. P. L. Thomas, associate professor of education (Furman University, Greenville, SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is currently a column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English) and series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Sense Publishers), in which he authored the first volume, Challenging Genres: Comics and Graphic Novels (2010). He recently published Ignoring Poverty in the U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education (Information Age Publishing, 2012) and has written volumes on Barbara Kingsolver, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph Ellison (Peter Lang USA). He maintains a blog addressing

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the role of poverty in education: http://livinglearninginpoverty.blogspot. com/. His teaching and scholarship focus on literacy and the impact of poverty on education, as well as confronting the political dynamics influencing public education in the United States. Follow his work @plthomasEdD and Radical Scholarship (http://wrestlingwithwriting.blogspot.com/). Eve Tuck is assistant professor of educational foundations at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her participatory action research with youth has focused on the unintended consequences of education policies such as high school exit exams on school push-out, and use and overuse of the GED credential by youth and schools. She has also conducted participatory action research with youth on human rights violations, competition, maldistributed resources and opportunities, and youths’ valuations of schooling in New York City. Her writing, which has chronicled Indigenous theories, qualitative research, research ethics, and theories of change, has appeared in the Urban Review and several edited volumes, including Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research and the Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. She is co-author of Theory and Educational Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation (2009) and author of Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-Aways, and the GED (2012).