Researching in Black Education Spaces: Contemplating the Consequentiality of the Research Site in Qualitative Education Research

Abstract

Qualitative methodologies that interrogate issues concerning Black children, youth, and school often reify deficit narratives. In stark contrast, we begin with the ontological reality and axiomatic truth of Black humanity—an unquestionable understanding that, regardless of how they may be viewed from the dominant, white gaze, Black people are indeed fully human and capable of robust intellectual achievement. In this article, we detail the ways we have taken up this epistemology in our research and address the following question: What are the methodological affordances of conducting qualitative research in Black Education Spaces? We describe two studies that utilize qualitative methodologies to delineate the expansive capabilities of children and youth across the African diaspora. The first study examined the educational experiences, self-making practices, and lifeworlds of Black American Muslim youth who journeyed to Senegal for Islamic education. The second study, which took place in the U.S., investigated the racial awareness sociopolitical perspectives, and literacy practices of five African American first graders. Taken together, these two studies elucidate that a full understanding of Black education and Black children and youth’s knowledges is most possible when conducting research in Black Education Spaces and that researchers must be accountable to the (Black) communities with whom we conduct research. We, therefore, highlight the necessity for qualitative methodologies that are engaged in a conceptualization of Blackness that is complex and dynamic, and which engages in reciprocal relationship with Black children, youth, and communities.

Keywords

Black Education diaspora research site Black Education Space qualitative methods BlackCrit

Introduction

Contemporary educational research suggests that Black students are in a state of crisis in U.S. schools (Lozenski, 2017). From disparate outcomes on standardized tests (Davis & Martin, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 2006), to extreme disciplinary measures and high suspension rates (Townsend, 2000; Wun, 2016), to overrepresentation in special education courses (Hines et al., 2021; O’Connor & Fernandez, 2006), to disparities in high school graduation rates (Heckman & LaFontaine, 2010), the data utilized in dominant educational narratives and discourses aims to convince us that Black students, across geographic location, gender, and socioeconomic status, are underperforming in K-12 education (Milner, 2012, 2013). By comparing Black students’ outcomes to white (and increasingly Asian) students, while ignoring the historical legacy of enslavement and disenfranchisement as well as ongoing structural barriers against African-descended communities, many education researchers point to the racialized disparities and achievement gaps that confront Black students as reasoning for perpetuating the notion that Black students are incapable of academic achievement. While there are certainly a multitude of structural injustices that have accumulated over time and contributed to a debt that the U.S. educational system owes to the Black students that it has miseducated (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Woodson, 1933), much of the existing literature on Black students nonetheless operates from deficit-based and damage-centered perspectives (Fránquiz & Ortiz, 2018; Tuck, 2009), perpetuates anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016; Shange, 2019), and locates the problem (and the responsibility to generate solutions) primarily with Black students themselves (Carey, 2014; Howard, 2019).

Yet, in contrast to these bleak portrayals, some education researchers have turned attention to the ways in which Black students are finding success, affirmation, and belonging within schools (e.g., Nasir et al., 2018; Wynter-Hoyte et al., 2023). For instance, Black youth are cultivating fugitive spaces of healing that offer refuge from the broader antiblack schooling landscape (Coles, 2019; Coles & Kingsley, 2021; Doucet & Kirkland, 2021; Mims et al., 2022). Furthermore, young Black students in elementary settings are constructing positive racial identities and expressing their sociopolitical perspectives in Black-centered school spaces (Johnson, 2022a; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019). These Black children and youth are part of a broader tradition among Black communities who have long resisted the miseducation of Black students and instead engaged in agentive practices to create more affirming spaces of learning (Anderson, 1988).

Black people in the U.S. and West Africa have and will always continue to engage education as a praxis of liberation (Payne & Strickland, 2008; Ware III, 2014). As such, it is the task of scholars to adopt epistemologies and research paradigms that make legible the liberatory work of Black communities across the diaspora. Rather than engage Black students from antiblack and deficit-based perspectives, scholars ought to undertake approaches to empirical inquiries that see and center the possibilities inherent to Black students (Warren, 2021). Doing so reflects an understanding of the ontological reality and axiomatic truth of Black humanity.

In this article, we build upon an emerging trend within education research with and on Black students that centers possibility, joy, genius, and thriving (Dunn & Love, 2020; Griffin & Turner, 2021; Muhammad, 2020, 2023; Warren & Coles, 2020; Williams, 2022). Our studies offer empirical and conceptual insights that reject antiblack renderings of Black students’ educational experiences and generate theoretical insights that can guide scholars committed to challenging damage-centered research on Black students. As such, in this article, we ask: What are the methodological affordances of conducting qualitative research in Black Education Spaces?

Bringing together qualitative and ethnographic research studies with Black students in the U.S. and Senegal, we highlight the epistemological lessons that emerge when researchers aim to spotlight Black students’ intellect and knowledge. First, in conducting our research, we rejected the premise that Black students need ‘fixing’. Instead, we operated from the understanding that Black students' inherent brilliance and boundless potential was an axiom, or a self-evident truth that needed not be proved (Gholson et al., 2012; Martin, 2019; Rahman, 2020). Importantly, this understanding influenced our process for selecting where to conduct our research. We chose contexts that had a historical and contemporary commitment to explicitly centering Black students and harnessing their inherent genius (Muhammad, 2020). Moreover, these were sociocultural contexts of learning where most, if not all, students were Black, and where Blackness was normative, celebrated, and the backdrop for the students’ learning (Dillard, 2020). These methodological intentionality in choosing these contexts laid the foundation for our research, in which we found multitude of ways in which Black students thrived as they learned in spaces that nurtured and affirmed their ways of being and belonging in the world (Johnson, 2022b; Rahman, 2020).

Although we conducted research in two distinct contexts and employed different data collection methods, we are unified in both our deep belief in the richness of Black identity and lived experiences as well as in our desire to document Black children and youth’s authentic ways of thinking and being. Placed in conversation with one another, our two studies elucidate the affordances of conducting research in Black Education Spaces; and the necessity of being accountable to the (Black) communities with whom we do research. We highlight the need for qualitative methodologies that are engaged through a conceptualization of Blackness that is full, complex, and dynamic and that seek to reimagine the possibilities of research with and for Black children and youth.

Historical & Theoretical Framing

We begin this work with the understanding that research is neither neutral nor objective. For centuries, social scientific research has been used to justify white supremacy, colonialism, and other hierarchical systems of racial, political, and economic exploitation (Asad, 1973; Beliso-De Jesus et al., 2023; Trouillot, 2003). Much of social scientific research has been shaped by what Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008) term “white logic” and “white methods”, or processes of academic reasoning and tools of research that are anchored in a fictional white imagination and that manufacture ways of thinking and data that are presented as social facts. For centuries and into the present, many scholars have utilized white logic and white methods to produce seemingly authoritative research that negates Black humanity.

Despite this, there has been a long tradition of critical scholarship by Black scholars who have rejected white supremacist research paradigms and instead advanced what might be considered pro-Black methodologies. As early as 1899, the African American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois published The Philadelphia Negro, a work that examined the conditions of everyday urban Black life in Philadelphia. As DuBois (1940) later pointed out, he conducted this research at a time when “the world was thinking wrong about race” (p. 58). Whereas dominant discourses blamed Black people for the social problems that existed in their community, DuBois (1899/1996) asserted that The Philadelphia Negro “revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence” (p. 59). As Elijah Anderson notes in his introduction to The Philadelphia Negro, “contrary to the eugenics theories of the day, it is clear that DuBois believed that the Negroes’ problems were rooted not in their heredity but rather in their environment and the social conditions that confronted them” (DuBois, 1899/1996, p. xvii). DuBois was thus part of a broader tradition of scholars across the African diaspora, including Cheikh Anta Diop and Zora Neale Hurston, who rejected white logic and white methods and instead produced textured scholarship that centered the perspectives and experiences of Black and African peoples. This tradition, which we sought to build upon, has inspired generations of scholars who carry forth their intellectual and political commitments and methodological stances to produce pro-Black, anti-racist, and decolonial scholarship that takes seriously Black people’s ways of knowing and being (Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021; Harrison, 1991; McKittrick, 2021; Mullings, 2007; Paris & Winn, 2013).

Our research was also informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and BlackCrit. CRT has shaped our understanding of racism as a permanent, endemic, and normal phenomenon that is ingrained into every aspect of life in the U.S. (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2023). Within the context of the U.S. schooling system, race is a significant factor that determines and fuels inequity (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Dominant racial stereotypes about Black, indigenous, and Latinx students include myths about their inferior intellectual abilities and academic dispositions, which in turn justify low expectations, remedial education, and other practices that further entrench racist inequity within schools and society (Solorzano, 1997). These stereotypes fuel anti-Black, deficit discourses about Black students (Dumas & ross, 2016; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001).

These racist realities, though often obscured to members of the dominant white racial group in the U.S., are ones that students of color often experience and understand through their everyday interactions in society. CRT urges people of color to develop counterstories, or experiential accounts told from their distinct viewpoints that challenge dominant myths about race and power and call out racist ideologies (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). For Black students, counterstories are narratives grounded in their onto-epistemological realities. Counterstories offer discourses and analyses that are in explicit opposition to the deficit-based, damage-centered, and pathologizing renderings of Black students (Coles, 2023; Ellison & Solomon, 2019; Kinloch et al., 2020). In particular, counterstories reject the dominant fictions within education research that associate Blackness with inferiority, remediation, and repair—a relationship that has been invented in white imaginaries (Alves, 2014; Martin, 2019).

We draw from CRT’s analysis of racism and emphasis on counterstories to spotlight Black brilliance and demonstrate the possibilities of education research with Black children and youth. Yet in recognizing that Black people in the past and present have confronted racism and white supremacy in specific and unique ways, we also turn to the insights of BlackCrit, which builds upon CRT but hones in on the impact of antiblackness in structuring Black people’s experiences in schools and society (Bryan, 2021; Coles & Powell, 2020; Dumas & ross, 2016; Jenkins, 2021). We engage BlackCrit as both theory and methodology, heading the call to engage in modes of knowledge production that are rooted in the dual understandings that “the U.S. is an anti-Black society which implicates all people, structures, and institutions within it and that we must center the Black voice specifically in research that aims to address and dismantle the violence of antiblackness” (Coles & Powell, 2020, p. 118). Theoretical understandings of antiblackness must thus inform scholars’ approach to research; utilizing BlackCrit methods require the

researcher’s possession of a standpoint epistemology that allows them to use critical race methods in ways that are attentive to Black knowledge/s and lived experiences. In order for BlackCrit methods and methodologies to be sound and meaningful, the researcher must see the importance and value in Black lived experiences. Researchers of BlackCrit must value Black life (Coles, 2022, np).

BlackCrit thus offers not only analysis of the racist conditions that constrain Black peoples’ lives, but also holds of central importance the work of resisting Black people’s dehumanization and actualizing more liberatory modes of existence.

By combining the insights of CRT and BlackCrit, we are attentive to the specific racial realities that confront Black students and aware of the permanent and foundational social structures that uphold antiblackness in the U.S. At the same time, drawing upon the powers of counterstorytelling and BlackCrit methods, and situating these approaches within a broader paradigm of social science research that refuses white methods and white logic, we have committed ourselves to undertaking education research that begins with the ontological reality and axiomatic truth of Black humanity—an unquestionable understanding that, regardless of how they may be viewed from a dominant white gaze, Black people are indeed fully human and capable of robust intellectual achievement (Okello et al., 2023). As such, we endeavor to engage in research that centers and amplifies the perspectives, needs, and insights of Black communities who have envisioned and strived to implement liberatory forms of education.

Researchers’ Positionalities

We come to this work as women of color scholars who are committed to educational equity and Black education in its most liberatory forms, and who are staunch believers in the brilliance and beauty of Black children and youth (Nyachae & Pham, 2023). We approach this research with the understanding that objectivity is a myth rooted in white supremacist ideology (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva (2008) remind us, “We are not Martians from another time or place, thus we cannot study society as outsiders. We are part of the world and study society from the inside” (p. 12). We thus reject the dominant pressure to construct and maintain distance between ourselves and our research, as well as the idea that sharing identities or overlapping investments with our research participants could distort our findings.

Instead, we leverage our positionalities as resources that generate unique insights. Throughout our research, we engaged in ongoing reflection about our positionality, how that impacted our relationship to and understanding of our participants, and how that is informed by historical, political, and social systems (Milner, 2007; Pasque et al., 2022). We strived to represent our research participants in ways that honored the rich stories they shared with us, rather than reproducing damage-centered narratives (Tuck, 2009). Finally, we come to this research with deep political and personal investments in imagining and actualizing education as a site of liberation. As mothers who are raising school-aged children and endeavoring to immerse them in nurturing spaces of learning, we approach questions of race and education with immense concern.

Rahman is a Bangladeshi American Muslim woman and mother. My research on the educational experiences of Black Muslim youth in the U.S. and Senegal is based on a decade and a half of deep engagement with a transnational religious community that I belonged to prior to becoming a researcher and of which I subsequently became an observing participant (Cox, 2015). In addition to my individual academic research agenda, I contribute to a public, community-led collaborative effort to document and preserve the history of the Black Muslim community that I write about. My research is thus from the vantage point of someone deeply involved in the work of envisioning, building, and sustaining nurturing educational spaces for Black Muslim youth.

Johnson is an African American woman raised in the Southern U.S. I am a former early childhood classroom teacher of predominately African American children. My research conceptualizes Black children’s capacities to learn and be in schools as expansive, and I believe that Black children are deserving of education spaces that honor and affirm their literacy practices. The broader aims of my research are to challenge the traditional and deficit-oriented hierarchies of conducting literacy research with young Black children and instead amplify their voices and perspectives, rooted in a deep belief in their abilities to name and analyze the world in which they live and strive.

Together, we unite our deep appreciations for the ingenuity and intellectualism of Black children, youth, and communities and see our research as a means to not only name antiblackness experienced within and outside schools, but also to generate modes of resistance that can foster Black educational liberation. Our personal, intellectual, and political perspectives directly contributed to our commitment to undertake research that rejected dominant conceptualizations of Black childhood and coming of age as deviant, as without possibility, as devoid of joy or fulfillment, as lacking brilliance. Instead, we chose to spotlight the beauty and ingenuity so apparent in their thinking, dispositions, actions, and words. In so doing, we observed that Black children and youth, when provided space outside of the white gaze, have consequential and instructive standpoints and lives that are deserving of documentation, not in an effort to prove their humanity but to affirm it (Okello et al., 2022).

Looking Across the Two Studies

The first study examined the educational experiences, self-making practices, and lifeworlds of a community of Black American Muslim youth who journeyed to Senegal for Islamic education. This multi-sited study was based on eight years of ethnographic fieldwork with 96 participants in Senegal and the U.S. The second study investigated the nature and depth of five African American children’s racialized, sociopolitical awareness as well as their literacy meaning making practices.

Both studies were grounded in the ontological reality of Black humanity. This reality was the core understanding that guided our methodological designs, and directly influenced: (1) where we chose to conduct research and (2) how we attempted to be in service to our research partners during and beyond the duration of our studies. In what follows, we consider our second guiding question—What are the methodological affordances of conducting qualitative research in Black Education Spaces? —and reflect on what can be gleaned from the place-based intentionality of our two studies. Taken together, these two studies offer important methodological implications for qualitative researchers invested in producing work that spotlights Black students’ situated knowledge in learning contexts

Researching in Black Education Spaces

Often, qualitative research articles include only cursory descriptions of research sites (Jadallah, 2024; Tuck et al., 2014). This trend is anchored in colonial logics that divorce knowledge from the physical and cultural contexts in which they are produced (Bang, 2017). In contrast, we understand place to be central to shaping the inquiries, relationships, and data that emerge through qualitative research. Where we chose to conduct our research thus laid the foundation for the kinds of insights we gathered.

We both chose settings that we assessed to be Black Education Spaces, or spaces curated for and by Black people that promote Black students’ self-determination, self-actualization, and self-efficacy (Bell & Sealey-Ruiz, 2023) and were “organized to facilitate [B]lack peoples’ well-being in an education institutional context that might otherwise be considered assaultive” (Warren & Coles, 2020, p. 383). Understanding that deficit-based research on Black students tends to occur in contexts in which Black students are judged against students of other racial groups, we instead selected research settings where we could understand, engage, and build with Black students on their own terms. Rather than attempt to understand how Black students’ mitigated racial trauma and racialized harm within predominantly white educational spaces, we instead selected spaces of racial affinity where Black students had opportunities to build community among themselves. Rather than reproduce multicultural narratives that strive for tolerance, inclusion, and integration into white society, we instead selected educational spaces geared towards nurturing Black students’ multi-layered identities and holistic well-being. Furthermore, these were spaces where Black children and youth were driving the curriculum, were supported in developing identities, and were encouraged to make meaning about their social, political, and religious worlds. Our studies elucidate that a fuller understanding of Black education and Black children and youth’s potentialities is only possible when thoughtful consideration is made about where the research is conducted.

Study 1

Study 1 took place in the city of Medina Baye, Senegal. Medina Baye is located in a rural region of Senegal, approximately 200 km (or 125 miles) northeast of the capital city Dakar. Medina Baye was founded in 1929 by Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (1900–1975), a Senegalese Islamic scholar, pan-Africanist, and spiritual guide in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). Shaykh Ibrahim founded Medina Baye as a refuge where his nascent community of Tijani disciples could live and practice their faith free of the ravages of French colonization. The sociopolitical context in which Medina Baye emerged contributed to my assessment of the city as a Black Education Space, in that it was created as a place where African Muslims could attempt to actualize self-determination and autonomy independent from the French colonial administration.

Shaykh Ibrahim’s Tijani Sufi movement quickly spread beyond Senegal, first attracting disciples from Mauritania, Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and other countries in West Africa, and subsequently garnering followers throughout the continent, including in countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, and South Africa. During the 20th century, under Shaykh Ibrahim’s leadership, the Tijani tariqa became the largest Muslim movement in Africa (Seesemann, 2011; Wright, 2015). By the 21st century, Shaykh Ibrahim’s global movement included disciples from the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Trinidad, Singapore, India, and Brazil. It also became the largest Sufi order among Black American Muslims in the U.S., many of whom visited or relocated to Medina Baye. These demographics further contributed to my understanding of Medina Baye as a Black Education Space in which a diverse community of African-diasporic Muslims came there to study and pursue spiritual growth.

In 1983, Shaykh Ibrahim’s grandson and spiritual heir, Shaykh Hassan Cisse (1945–2008) opened the African American Islamic Institute (AAII) in Medina Baye. AAII was an international Islamic boarding school emerged through the collective vision of Shaykh Hassan and Hajjah Kareemah Abdul-Kareem, a Black American Muslim woman, disciple in the Tijani tariqa, and mother from New York City whose previous visits to Medina Baye sparked her desire to create a study abroad experience there where her children and other youth from the U.S. could learn about their religion and history as Muslims of African descent. Together, Shaykh Hassan and Hajjah Kareemah opened the school, which became the first institution of its kind – an Islamic school in Senegal created for and by Black American Muslims in partnership with Senegalese Muslims. The school’s name contributed my assessment of it as a Black Education Space; the name reflected Shaykh Hassan’s pan-African vision and efforts to rekindle ties between Africans and African Americans that had been forcibly severed by the transatlantic slave trade. In its forty-plus years of operation, AAII has served hundreds of Black American Muslim students, in addition to Muslim students from throughout Senegal, Africa, and the diaspora. AAII was therefore also a Black Education Space; it was a learning context that prioritized and centered the intersectional perspectives and needs of Black Muslims. Nestled within an entire city that was a Black Education Space, the school was part of an expansive research context in which to investigate the possibilities that emerged when Black students learned in spaces that were created explicitly to serve their unique needs.

The founding vision of Medina Baye as a refuge, the city’s historical and contemporary role as a site of pan-African exchange, the school’s name and initial purpose of educating Black American Muslim students, and parents’ understandings of the holistic educational experience offered in Medina Baye and at AAII all made the city, community, and school a generative site of study

Study 2

Study 2 examined whether, how, and from what sources African American children understood racial difference and sociopolitical conditions. I engaged in this research with the belief that Black children, because of their social location, may have a heightened awareness of inequity and injustice in society, and that with participatory, qualitative inquiry, I might be able to uncover a more nuanced perspective of young children’s racial awareness and critical literacies.

The data was collected in an independent neighborhood school in an urban, predominately Black metropolitan city in the Northeast U.S. The school was small and operated in a converted row home. The embodiment of Warren and Coles (2020) definition of Black Education Spaces, Ujamaa Elementary (pseudonym) began as a reading program and over the past 40 years has expanded to a Pre-Kindergarten thru sixth grade elementary school. The school’s actual name, although not included here to ensure the confidentiality of my participants, reflects the embedded nature of Black culture in the way the school operates. The founder and principal felt that there needed to be an alternative to the public school options in the neighborhood and felt compelled to create a school where the children’s identities led the curriculum and pedagogy (Johnson, 2022a). Educating predominately Black students, the school has a clear commitment to the social justice, whether through participation in protests and demonstrations, the creation of textbooks that tell narratives of historical Black figures, invited speakers like former Freedom Fighters from the Civil Rights Movement, participation in capoeira classes, or field trips to Langston Hughes home in Harlem.

Moreover, there is a strong focus on developing the literate identities of the children through poetry recitation and collaborative creation. The children in my study--five African American first graders (ages 6 and 7), three girls and two boys--had all been enrolled at the school for at least one year (i.e., attended Kindergarten there as well) and had parents who firmly believed in the school’s value and vision and desired for their children to have their Blackness affirmed in their everyday schooling experiences. In a city that has severely underfunded schools, parents felt the benefits of being in environment not only with small class sizes and the potential for personalized academic attention but also one that was immersed in Black intellectual thought, Black aesthetics, and Black cultural production an invaluable learning opportunity for their children. Parents felt that the school had what most others lacked: a clear commitment to fostering their children’s positive racial identities and an unwavering dedication to being engaged in the local community’s struggles for change.

The site of this research came about synergistically. The principal, a longtime resident of the local community, felt that my work and intention were aligned with the school’s mission and pedagogical approach. As the fifth and sixth grade history teacher, she knew that the older children enrolled in the school developed a critical, racial consciousness, but she wanted empirical data about the ways that the younger children were digesting and naming their learning about the inequities present in their local and global communities. Seeing themselves as a space of educational refuge and educative balm for Black students, they sought to verify that their mission-vision was impactful to all, not just the older children. Ms. Helen (pseudonym) has always been clear about her desire for the Black children in the school to learn about their heritage, to tell expansive Black histories, to know about issues both in their communities, to amplify and find connection with the struggles of marginalized people around the world. My initial assessments coupled with my engagements with the staff, curriculum, and families demonstrated the intentionality of centering Blackness and advancing Black education at Ujamaa.

Conclusion

Our choice of research sites thus underscores the value of conducting historically grounded research. Because the struggle for Black educational liberation is ongoing (Rahman & Johnson, 2023), it is critical that we develop a sophisticated understanding of the work that previous generations have done to advance this goal. For instance, learning about the history of how and why Medina Baye, AAII, and Ujamaa were founded helped crystalize our perspective that these would be generative contexts at which to pursue our research. Furthermore, in order to develop rigorous analyses of contemporary educational phenomena, it is critical that we learn about the vision, labor, and internal debates and efforts that produced the Black educational contexts that we study today. Our recognition of the fact that both AAII and Ujamaa had operated for approximately four decades sparked our curiosity about how the schools had evolved over time to meet the changing needs of Black students in the 21st century. Overall, our attentiveness to the historical context of our research sites fueled rich lines of inquiry that deepened our understanding of Black Education Spaces across time and space.

Accountability to Black Communities

Although site selection and identification are important, an ongoing relationship and meaningful engagement with our research partners is equally, if not even more consequential to the work. After we selected our sites, we thus committed ourselves to identifying ways to be accountable to our research partners beyond the duration of our studies. Our investment in fostering modes of accountability was further informed by our understanding that the Black intellectual tradition is prescriptive, in that it offers “practical steps for the empowerment of Black people” (Marable, 2000, p. 2). As such, we sought to foster intellectual collaborations that would bring tangible benefit to the community, rather than extract knowledge for the primary purpose of fueling our own scholarly and professional advancement. Through conversations and prolonged engagement, we learned about the ways in which we could leverage our skills and knowledge to be of service to the community. Our desire to producing prescriptive knowledge thus required us to foreground accountability to Black communities, who honored us with their time, rich stories, and insightful analyses as they welcomed us in as participating observers (Cox, 2015) in their spaces.

Study 1

During the longest period of fieldwork at AAII, I engaged in regular – and quite often, daily – dialogue with school administrators about curriculum, pedagogy, achievement data, parental engagement, and finances. Having conducted extensive formal interviews with nearly one hundred students, parents, alumni, and teachers, I had a unique vantage point from which to identify and summarize reoccurring themes, interests, and visions among different stakeholders who were involved with the school and broader community. As I grew to be a regular fixture at the school, I became involved in important conversations and brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders who were invested in evaluating and improving the school. Through this process, I helped develop a new business plan and five-year vision for a new school, which was an offshoot from the previous one and that most Black American students ultimately transferred to.

Since 2018, I have remained involved in the new school’s operations. I served as the admissions liaison for parents who are interested in enrolling their children at the school. I developed the admissions application process, facilitated one-on-one informational sessions over the phone with prospective parents, and conducted intake questionnaires about prospective parents. As I spoke with parents, I often discussed the findings I had gathered from my own qualitative research, and shared copies of my published works to those parents who sought to learn more.

My ongoing relationship with and accountability to the community has deepened and transformed my inquiries. While my role as a qualitative researcher introduced me to the multiple perspectives of those involved in creating, curating, and experiencing a Black Education Space, my role as a collaborator has given me important applied insights into the challenges, successes, and ongoing struggle necessary to maintain a Black Education Space.

Study 2

Throughout my time at Ujamaa, I saw the ways that commitment was modeled through collective action and community involvement. At any given time, parents and community members were in classrooms volunteering, supporting instruction, or providing extracurricular opportunities to the children. I saw the ways that the school lifted up relationality alongside the intellectual work and desired to be a part. After the conclusion of my data collection cycle (e.g., participant observations, interviews, and after-school literature circle meetings with the children), I spent an entire year providing weekly diverse literature read alouds. I would visit the school’s kindergarten and first grade classrooms and engage them in texts they may not have read prior. We would discuss connections they found, and I would also stay to hear them recite poetry they had either memorized or written themselves. I would often stay to chat with the principal and other staff members about the latest events at the school. During that time, I would also catch up with the children who were enrolled in my study. In addition to my read alouds, I served as a chaperone for a field trip to a local performing arts center and have contributed to annual events through ongoing financial sponsorship. I intend to reestablish my formal research relationship with Ujamaa so that I might amplify the past and present work of the school their activist efforts as well as their strong culturally responsive literacy practices for future researchers and early literacy practitioners.

In all, I sought to be accountable to Ujamaa and the Black children who were enrolled during my time there in the sincerest ways. By leveraging my expertise in diverse children’s literature and supporting existing instructional practices, I aimed to complement the school and its commitment to being a Black Education Space. As a Black woman, I felt an affinity for the children, their parents, and the broader community in which they are situated. I understood that my study was not being conducted in isolation but was meant to advance their vision through empirical documentation.

Conclusion

Foregrounding accountability shaped the work we did during our research and since we officially concluded our studies. In addition to our formal modes of data collection, we both leveraged our skillsets and resources to contribute to additional activities at our research sites. The forms of accountability that we detail above impacted our vantage points, ultimately enabling us to analyze, write, and contribute from a place where we felt immersed in the context and in actionable solidarity with those directly involved with the work of creating nurturing educational spaces for Black children and youth.

Final Reflection

The two studies featured in this article illustrate the ways that Blackness can and should be affirmed, centered, and amplified. We brought together two distinct research contexts in the U.S. and Senegal to show how we can deepen our commitment to improve the educational experiences and eradicate damage-centered research with Black children and youth throughout the African diaspora. The two research contexts were immersed in Blackness – aesthetically, spiritually, and intellectually. They were Black Education Spaces that sought to nurture the possibilities in Black children and youth, resist assimilation to whiteness, and engage Black history in robust and generative ways. In both of our studies, we selected our research sites based on our understanding and appreciation of the historical legacies that informed the contemporary educational contexts. We were interested in conducting research in sites that were situated within Black communities where people understood education to be critical to broader projects of self-determination, autonomy, and empowerment. We were drawn to research sites where educators, students, and community members had thought deeply about the epistemological, political, and intellectual dimensions of educating Black students, and the potential harms that came with having them learn and develop in other spaces. We, therefore, selected research sites that had been established as autonomous educational spaces intentionally designed to support Black students’ success. As such, these spaces centered Black people’s ways of knowing and being, without comparison to white students, or without ongoing concern of the white gaze. Our knowledge of these long-standing historical dynamics attracted us to these research sites, which we viewed as ideal contexts in which to better understand the possibilities and challenges associated with educating Black students’ multi-layered identities in nurturing ways in the contemporary moment.

The initial assessments that prompted us to select these research sites were further affirmed as we began our data collection. In both of our studies, through our in-depth, qualitative engagement with Black students, families, and communities, we gained insights into how and why our participants found value in the educational contexts.

For instance, in Study 1, all Black American students at AAII completed some years of schooling in the urban U.S. prior to studying abroad in Medina Baye. The majority of these youth previously lived in Detroit, Atlanta, Washington D. C, or New York City. In these major urban centers, their parents enrolled them in a range of schooling options, including neighborhood public school, charter schools, community-based Muslim schools, and homeschools. In my interviews with parents, I found several reoccurring reasons that fueled parents’ decisions. These included: the desire for their children to learn in a school and live in a city where young people’s racial and religious identities would not be minoritized; the desire to have their children undertake a sacred educational pursuit; the desire to shield their children from detrimental influences and experiences that plagued the lives of Black and Muslim students in the U.S.; the desire to inculcate their children with global perspectives and cross-cultural understanding. These varied reasons underscored Black American Muslim parents’ interest in a Black Muslim Education Space that promoted their children’s holistic growth and well-being.

Similarly, in Study 2, upon entering Ujamaa Elementary you feel the bold and vibrant nature of the knowledge production and sharing that takes place. You see the displays of social justice ideologies and declarations of Black liberation through the student artwork on the walls. You hear the students reciting Langston Hughes’ poetry and declaring “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”. Moreover, I listened to the five families from my study assert their love and admiration for Ujamaa, its Black teachers, and the pedagogical approaches they employed to build students’ positive racial-ethnic identities. During my time at Ujamaa, it was evident that this space was resolute in affirming Black children, ensuring their love for literacy, and nurturing their minds, bodies, and souls.

By ignoring comparative claims and instead examining Black children and youth in affirming, Black-centered contexts, research can more richly depict the nuances of Black students’ educational experiences. Our studies’ intent focus on site selection and accountability demonstrates what can happen when education researchers take seriously the responsibility to conduct research with, for, and about Black children and youth in ways that reject deficit narratives and center the beauty and brilliance of Black life throughout the diaspora.

Education research that seeks to take up this kind of exploration will yield a more generative epistemology of Black children and youth’s experiences in and outside of schools; in other words, we will arrive at a better understanding of what they know, who they can be in schools, and how they see themselves in the world. Researchers must be mindful of where they choose to conduct research and how they engage in reciprocal action if they desire Black students' educational, social, and cultural experiences to be illustrated in a more precise and truthful way. Seeking out Black Education Spaces and being committed to accountability at the research site will enable Black children and youth to be listened to more carefully, their opinions, perspectives, and social theorizing will be honored. As a result, dominant narratives such as underperformance and apathy toward education will be undermined and countered. Black children and youth must be documented in education research on their own terms and in their own unique ways of being both in and out of schools.

Footnotes

Author's Note

The contributions of Rahman & Johnson were equal, and the writing of the piece was entirely collaborative.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Samiha Rahman

Wintre F. Johnson

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