From practice-to-research-to-practice: leveraging reciprocal partnerships to advance racial justice in education across contexts and ecological levels

ABSTRACT

African American families face significant racial barriers to their educational attainment. Within the experience of schooling specifically, anti-Black oppressive forces manifest in both structural and interpersonal forms, and existing challenges have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Black families have consistently developed strategies for navigating racialized educational barriers. Moreover, their own agency has been enhanced through engagement with justice-oriented community partnerships. The current study captures how a reciprocal university-community partnership advanced African American parent agency before and during the pandemic. The history of the partnership is first detailed, followed by a qualitative study of data from six parent focus groups regarding parents’ perceptions of barriers to educational success across public and private school contexts, their own efforts to overcome those barriers, and the role of the community university partnership in advancing the families’ educational aims. Findings reveal ecologically distinct racialized barriers in public and private school settings, with economic barriers transcending educational contexts. Black parents navigated these barriers with adaptative strategies across parent involvement domains. Implications for research, practice, and university-community partnerships are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Community engagement
• african Americans
• education
• racial equity
• parenting
• qualitative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The terms African American and Black are used interchangeably throughout this text.

2. A fifth founding program, Higher Achievement Pittsburgh, was a local chapter of a national organization before closing its doors in 2019 due to economic challenges. Higher Achievement Pittsburgh provided academic enrichment, mentoring, and educational counseling to more than 100 public middle school students annually.

3. The terms parents and caregivers are used interchangeably throughout the manuscript to acknowledge the fact that the act of parenting – one of primary caregiving for a youth – is carried out by way of many familial and kinship roles (grandparents, older siblings, etc.). Both are used here as inclusive of having primary caregiving responsibilities for youth regardless of the precise relational positionality of the provider.

4. Funding for this study was provided by grants from The Heinz Endowments (grant E9539).

5. All study participant and corresponding school and neighborhood names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The Heinz Endowments (as administered by the Crossroads Foundation) [E9539].