Creating Spaces

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Creating Spaces

• For often unheard voices in HE Teaching Black
  perspectives and working with Black and
  ethnically minoritised people in HE
• Carlton Howson Craig Pinkney
• De Montfort University
• Youth and Community Division

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Context/ background

• Education legacy impact on Black (BEMP)
• HE experience
• Location population
• Diversity University
• Policy widening participation
• Professional formation/values anti-oppressive
  practice

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MySpace
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Research Methods Key Decisions

• Qualitative research paradigm
• External facilitation
• Process/outcomes, ends/means
• Students dialogue groups
• Biography
• Case studies

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Underlying Principles

• Freirian principles of dialogue
• Purpose or process is transformative
• Technologies of participatory development
• Issues concerning critical research practices
• Critical Race Theory
• YCD social justice

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Arising Issues

• Emergence of need to negotiate
• Risk of domestication
• Recognition of shifting boundaries
• Need to sustain notion safe space
• Engage together in a process of discovery
• Crosby in Deer Richardson, L. and Wolfe, M.
  Principles and Practice of informal education,
  Oxon Routledge Falmer. (2005 59)

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Three themes that emerge from discussion

• Learning Contracts
• Mentoring systems
• Radical Curriculum

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Issues race, identity exclusion

• Discrimination
• Inter racial racism
• Sense of belonging - Isolation
• Cultural obligations that mitigate against
  attendance at university or completion of work
• Societal perceptions of Black male students (i.e.
  aggressive)
• People look at you differently without realising

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The silent ones

• I am prepared to initiate some change in the
  university and its approach towards students,
  because I am in touch with the "silent-ones", who
  speak to me about how they truly feel but do not
  have enough confidence in the initiatives that
  are being created. I feel if we all work
  together, things will improve for all the
  students.

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Making space for voices that are not heard

• Part of our task as informal educators is to ask
  why certain voices are not heard
• Jeffs, T. Smith, M. (199940), Informal
  Education- Conversation, Democracy Learning.
  Derbyshire Education Now Publishing Cooperative.
  

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Education

• As Oppressor
• As Liberator
• As Transformer
• A system that can neutralise and conform
  difference

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Role

• We need to encourage our students to be complex
  thinkers, going beyond the choice of binary
  opposites
• Rather embracing the idea of multiple options,
  the complex challenges, developing skills
• This is a significant role for student and tutor

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How can I rise?

• Anger over race.
• Race over anger.
• Questions I ask,
• But no one to answer.
• Your judgments of me,
• Limit my outcomes.
• Your assumptions of me,
• Broaden my experience.

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• If I told you my race
• Am I validated into your racist institution?
• Or am I a disgrace,
• On this attempt to better our situation?
• When you preach equality,
• I still feel the presence of this oppression.
• I know I anger you,
• But I will continue to ask this question.

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• You claim you want to understand
• My problem
• But you have a problem when I open the gates
• To my experience.
• My friend I cannot offer you an understanding,
• But I can offer you knowledge of my experience to
  effectively challenge.
• My experiences can arm you with the awareness of
  the abandoning of my very existence.

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• I share with you now how I feel,
• This is not for pity but to illustrate how the
  struggle is still very real.
• Like you I be born and then crawl,
• But when I try to rise in this political world I
  fall.
• These laws are put forth heavily brushed in this
  word equality.
• This is an insult to my existence because this
  allows these fools to ignore our pain and our
  humility.

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• This humility that they forced upon us,
• This humility that is still very much amongst us.
• Because we fight a battle on pre-established
  false grounds.
• We fight a war with invalid arms.
• I say invalid not in vain.
• I say it because we are unaware of this
  institutionally racist game.
• When we are in school being educated?
• Now can you say you understand?
• How we are alienated?

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• Because if you have not experienced like I...
• ...if you have not struggled as I,
• You saying you understand is a true full on lie.

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• Anger over race.
• Race over anger.
• Questions I ask.
• But no one will answer.
• Written by Babita Kumar 19.11.2007

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References

• Crosby in Deer Richardson, L. and Wolfe, M.
  Principles and Practice of informal education,
  Oxon Routledge Falmer. (2005 59)
• Donnison, D. (1998) Policies for a Just Society,
  Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan
• Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
  Harmondsworth Penguin.
• hooks, b (1992) Black Looks, race and
  representation, Turnaround
• Jeffs, T. Smith, M. (199940), Informal
  Education- Conversation, Democracy Learning.
  Derbyshire Education Now Publishing Cooperative.
  
• Richardson, B. (2005) Tell it like it is How our
  schools fail Black children, Trentham Books Stoke
  on Trent.
• Thomas, J. (1993) Doing Critical Ethnography.
  Sage California