“My Greatness Made a Difference There”: Exploring the High School Experiences of High Achieving Black Girls

Abstract

Recent studies have provided insight into the schooling experiences and lives of Black girls. These studies highlight the challenges that Black girls face in the school environment including underachievement, disproportionality in school discipline, deficit ideologies, and educator and counselor bias. The current study centers the voices on high achieving Black girls in an effort to center their unique and nuanced experiences in high school. Data was collected using in-depth individual interviews and analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. We found that high achieving Black girls must navigate deficit thinking and negative stereotypes similar to their peers while they also pull strength and resilience from their intersecting identities. Further, high achieving Black girls were tenacious in their pursuits and found familial and teacher relationships to be paramount in their success. These findings support the importance of developing intentional and systemic supports to counter intersectional oppression to meet the needs of high achieving Black girls.

Using Poetry to Foster Positive Racial Identity in Middle School Black Girls: Implications for School Counselor Practice, Preparation, and Research

“…Although both Black boys and girls experience racial discrimination and microaggressions in our society, we focus in this article on Black girls because we perceive a need for more scholarship and research dedicated to supporting, uplifting, and validating the experiences of these students. Black girls' discrimination experiences are often understudied and excluded from the literature, which can lead to false discourse around their educational experiences (Mayes et al, 2023;Porter & Byrd, 2021;Seaton & Tyson, 2019). Indeed, many in leadership and decision-making roles, such as policymakers and school administrators, overlook the experiences and needs of Black girls, often choosing to focus attention on the educational experiences of Black boys (Neal-Jackson, 2018;Ricks, 2014).…”