Classroom counterspaces: centering Brown and Black students in doctoral education

ABSTRACT

Campus counterspaces exist as spaces where Brown and Black students can promote their own learning, and where their experiences are considered valid and critical knowledge. However, research on classrooms as counterspaces has often been limited to ethnic studies courses. Using data collected from a graduate-level research methods course situated in the U.S, this study explores what constitutes a classroom counterspace, and how instructors can create classroom counterspaces. Data were mainly collected through student conversations, reflections, classroom observations, and field notes. Drawing from Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, the study revealed that classroom counterspaces recognize the complexity of Brown and Black identity, push back against whiteness, and support Brown and Black students’ vulnerable and honest perspectives on the academy. These findings highlight areas where instructors can rethink their pedagogical approaches to create classroom counterspaces, and suggest that classroom counterspaces also push against the hegemony found in current U.S. higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderlands theory
• classroom counterspaces
• Brown and Black graduate students

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions made this work stronger. I also want to acknowledge my writing group—Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Maren Linett, Toni Rogat, Erin Moodie, Cara Kinnally, and Rebekah Klein-Pejsova—for their very helpful feedback on early drafts of this manuscript. Many thanks to Stephen Secules and Isaac Gottesman for providing me with useful feedback on various sections in the article. And lastly, I share my gratitude for the many Brown and Black graduate students who I work with, and who (hopefully) see me as a bridge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For the purpose of this article, racial identity refers to ‘the racial category or categories that an individual use to name themselves and these are based on factors including racial ethnicity, physical appearance, early socialization, recent or past personal experiences, and a sense of shared experience with members of a particular group’ (Wijeyesinghe 2012, 82).

2 Borders (those that create borderlands) are clearly marked areas that function to limit access (Elenes and Delgado Bernal 2009). They tell us who can or cannot legitimately occupy certain spaces (Harris and Nicolazzo 2020).

3 #CiteASista is a popular hashtag on Twitter used to encourage academics to cite Black women in their syllabi and research.