Getting personal? Student talk about racism

Abstract

This research explores student responses to Beyond Today, an after school program that brings youth together from diverse urban neighborhoods to form a multiracial community. Through the enacted curriculum, Beyond Today facilitators scaffold opportunities for students to study race and racial discrimination in historical and contemporary contexts. In this article, we examine how the students personally related to examples of racism and inequity. Our work is based on the premise that if individuals are to develop the impetus to be change makers in society, they should build personal connections to past and present day examples of injustice. During the year of this research, some lessons provided a context for students to describe personal connections to socio-historical trends of racism, while the observation of other lessons helped us investigate the educational practices that may dampen such participation. We explore three lessons that portray students’ comparative responses. We conclude with recommendations for educators who wish to promote students’ stories about inequity in their own teaching contexts and craft visions of how to facilitate conversations with youth about racism.

Keywords:

• racism
• discrimination
• student talk
• multiracial community
• multicultural curriculum

Notes

1. Names of schools, students, and facilitators have been replaced by pseudonyms. Beyond Today is also a pseudonym. Also, in the United States, many elementary schools service students from ages six to eleven. The students in this program were between the ages of nine and eleven.

2. While the chosen history lessons focus on racism towards the African American community, the overall curricula presented the experiences of various marginalized groups, including Latino/a and Asian Americans.

3. The details of these questions were obscured so as not to reveal the city in which this program occurred. Furthermore, names of particular neighborhoods were deleted to further protect the participants’ anonymity.

4. In the original curriculum enactment, the school names referenced particular areas in the students’ city. We replaced these names so to illustrate how this activity could reflect the segregated nature of many cities. The Beyond Today program facilitators also changed the names of the schools to these names for the simulation the following year.