We have witnessed our universities becoming neoliberal institutions as monetary goals surmount academic ones and knowledge becomes a commodity. As professors in a neoliberal institution, we mourn in this moment as we are forced to become skilled at negotiating the power of neoliberalism and our qualitative passion for social justice. Although this mourning manifests itself on multiple fronts, after outlining our ethics and sharing personal vignettes, we discuss the ethical tensions of teaching qualitative research, a marginalized paradigm, in this neoliberal moment.
In this article, we draw from two independent, completed projects that forced us to struggle with our ethics and how we understood the nature of the researcher–participant relationship. We move past the presumption that we social justice–minded qualitative researchers are “needed” to discuss how we understand ourselves to be meeting that need. Here, our intent is to trouble qualitative researchers’ underlying assumptions about help and harm when we are working against oppression and inequity and/or toward justice and equity, both for our subjects/participants and for society.
In this article, we examine urban teachers' perceptions of school reform models (SRMs) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). In particular, we examined how urban educators altered mandated reform models in the best interests of their culturally and linguistically diverse students. We discuss data from a phenomenological study, which included in-depth interviews and a focus group with seven urban African-American educators. We explore three facets of the intersection of culturally relevant pedagogy and mandated school reforms: (1) Teachers' use of CRP to empower urban students; (2) Teachers' beliefs that SRMs hurt African American students more than help them; (3) Teachers' adaptations of SRMs with culturally relevant practices. Finally, this article explores the implications for practice and policy when culturally relevant teachers struggle to utilize CRP in the implementation of SRMs.
The recent death of Amy Joyner, a promising Wilmington, Delaware, high school sophomore demonstrates very clearly the ways in which Black girls are made vulnerable in urban schools. Joyner, an honor roll student, was jumped by a group of girls in the bathroom just before classes began. The alleged cause of the fight was jealousy over a boy. Black girls are bombarded with popular culture messages defining Black femininity along narrow notions of sex appeal, maintaining romantic relationships, and having the ability to fight. Black girls are neither invited in the process of critically examining their popular representation nor supported in thinking through its impact in their own lives. This aspect of the null curriculum, coupled with Black girls' persistent criminalization, makes schools risky places for Black girls. They are left to navigate a society which misunderstands their gender performance without the support or opportunities they need to develop authentic definitions of self, all the while being held subject to beliefs, policies, and practices which surveil and contain them. Despite the neoliberal assault urban educators face, this article argues that urban educators have an epistemic responsibility to critically examine the denigration of Black womanhood in society, incorporate critical media
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