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Autoethnography, Black Motherwork, and Educational Marronage w/ Dr. Dawn Demps
45 Plays1 year ago
In this emotionally resonant episode of 'Willing To Learn,' host Dr. Ashley D. Domínguez delves deep with Dr. Dawn Demps, exploring her groundbreaking Ph.D. work that employs autoethnography to scrutinize racial disparities in education. Dr. Demps shares her personal journey, revealing how her son's experiences not only spurred her academic investigations but also led her to embrace 'Homeschooling as Marronage' as a form of resistance and liberation. This act of educational marronage forms a critical backdrop to her quest to 'interrupt the school to prison pipeline,' which culminated in her first solo publication in the Journal of Negro Education. The conversation traverses the terrains of Black Feminisms and Critical Race Theory, offering an incisive look at the intimate intersections between personal narratives, systemic racial disparities, and scholarly advocacy.
Books and Links:
- Dr. Dawn Demps Website
- All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community by Carol B Stack
- Any book by Pedro Noguera
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
- Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Scienceby Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, Daniel M. Goldstein
- Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco by Savannah Shange
- Race Mentoring website: https://www.infoagepub.com/products/RACE-Mentoring-Through-Social-Media
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM:
@willingtolearnpodcast
@ashleydominguezlopez
Contact: [email protected]
Produced by: Jeffrey Anthony
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Willing to Learn'
00:00:06
Speaker
This is willing to
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Willing to Learn, where we believe that when we know more, we can do more. I'm your host, Dr. Ashley D. Dominguez. Today's guest is
Dr. Dimps' Background and Career
00:00:30
Speaker
Dr. Dawn Dimps, an assistant professor in Educational Policy Studies and Practice at the University of Arizona.
00:00:36
Speaker
Dr. Demps hails from Flint, Michigan, where she learned from community peers and elders the principles and strategies of community organizing and development. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, Flint in Africana Studies and Social Sciences and went on to obtain her MA in Social Justice Studies from Detroit's Marygrove College.
00:00:54
Speaker
She received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, in education policy and evaluation. Her area of focus utilizes theories such as Black feminism, critical race theory, and community cultural wealth to look at the historical and contemporary policies and practices that contribute to the educational pushout of racialized populations.
00:01:14
Speaker
She further interrogates the ways those populations resist such exclusionary efforts to advocate for policy changes and work towards the creation of inclusive futures. From this work, she queries how we have come to determine and define who are educational leaders. Please welcome to the podcast, Dr. Dawn Demps.
00:01:35
Speaker
Hello, Dr. Don Demps. How are you today? I am well. Thank you so much for having me here today. Of course. Now, some people may not know, but we actually met during our time at Arizona State University. And actually, what I remember is my first memory of you is that we were both in a course with Dr. Melanie Bertrand. However, I was the student because you were a couple of years ahead and you were serving as a TA or a co-instructor on the board. Do you remember? Yep, yep, yep, yep.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yes, I do remember that. And to think that you're here with me
Publication and Community Work
00:02:10
Speaker
now, I was like, I know, Ashley. So yeah. I know it's so wild how time passes. And I just remember, I remember at the time, I remember you sharing a little bit of your personal story and your history and being very impressed with you because you are in all the spaces, you're navigating different organizations.
00:02:29
Speaker
and you're a mother and a parent to not only biological children, but to other children and people in your community that you're able to help. So I was, of course, truly intrigued and honored when I saw that your recent piece came out, Blooming in the Shafts, A Black Mother's Scholar's Tale of Flipping Pandemic Precarity to Educational Possibility.
00:02:50
Speaker
When I saw that was recently published in the Journal of Negro Education, I was like, oh, I have to talk to her about it. So congratulations on your recent publication. Thank you so much. I can't say how happy I am about that. When I first started being a PhD student, once I realized that I wanted to go into academia, I was like, first place I'm going to publish is the Journal of Negro Education.
00:03:13
Speaker
And in fact, it was not my first publication, but it's my first solo publication. And so I was so happy about that and I was able to do that. Awesome. Well, congratulations again. And just to give the listeners a little bit of background of who you are and what led you to this moment and to this piece and your journey, can you tell the listeners a little bit about your life and about you and what led you to being interested in this critical work?
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So I am from Flint, Michigan, and my mother, I came up in a community full of other mothers, right? Of people who were caregivers and caretakers of all the children in the community, including my own mother.
00:03:55
Speaker
And she used to run a nonprofit. She did a lot of nonprofit type work and wrote grants and did things with the church out in the community. And so I just followed her and would go knock on doors when she was passing out flyers for the summer camp. Right. And go and pass out flyers in the parking lot of the grocery store about the afterschool program or the Halloween camp that we had coming up. So I really learned a lot from her about how you get people involved, how you bring people in.
00:04:25
Speaker
And as I got a little bit older, just going out into my community in Flint, I joined different organizations, largely of women of color, especially black women who were doing this type of organizing work to change things in the community.
00:04:42
Speaker
So I have run a number of nonprofit organizations. I did a lot of youth program development work. I was a grant writer in the nonprofit field. And that just kind of is my background. A lot of community organizing. I was trained by some wonderful people around community organizing. And so that's my background. Fast forward to now.
00:05:09
Speaker
what got me interested in the study.
Research on School-to-Prison Pipeline
00:05:12
Speaker
So the piece that came out of the Journal of Negro Education is
00:05:16
Speaker
a small piece out of my larger dissertation work. And my dissertation study was following a group of Black mothers, natural mothers and other mothers who were fighting to stop the school to prison pipeline, fight and interrupt the school to prison pipeline, change policies that contributed to the school to prison pipeline in the community that they were in. So I did an ethnographic study following them
00:05:40
Speaker
Probably for, it was about three years. I did about a year and a half pre-field work and then I got my IRB and started collecting data and everything. So the piece in the Journal of New York Education came from that work.
00:05:53
Speaker
Can I ask how you were able to collaborate with this group? Maybe how you found them? How did you decide it would be a good fit to work with one another? Just because I know a lot of students and early-career faculty sometimes, they want to jump in the community, but maybe they're nervous. They don't know how. They're worried about how to establish that rapport and build connections.
00:06:13
Speaker
Yes, so that could be a whole podcast by itself. So I talk to my students all the time. They're getting ready to do their dissertation. They're like, oh, I want to study this thing. And I'm like, do you know anything about that community? Well, no, they're just interesting. No. Right. For me.
00:06:35
Speaker
And I'm probably a little more radical. I think it is very important to be invested in the community, which is also why I think I am drawn to ethnography. I'm in the middle of starting another ethnographic study, because I think ethnography, if done well, right? That can be a whole nother question about how ethnography says historically have not been done well.
00:06:54
Speaker
allow you to invest in the community to build up trust. And building up trust takes more than a month, right? It takes more than, oh, I came to a meeting. And so now they should know who I am. Hey, you, will you let me interview you and share your life with me? No. All right.
00:07:09
Speaker
So how I was able to get connected with the organization is I actually met them a couple of times. I ran into them a couple of times. I was wanting to do some work with ACLU around their school and prison pipeline work. And this was one of the other grassroots organizations that was working with them. So I first met them there and I was like, okay, they're very interesting. So I joined the group. At that point, I said, I would like to become a member of your group.
00:07:35
Speaker
You know, you focus on Black mothers and powering and moving this mission forward. But I didn't think about them to be the focus of my study.
00:07:46
Speaker
Then I met them at a conference that I went to, right? And me and the founder of the organization were doing the same session. We're in the same session presenting work. And so we spoke again and I was like, I think that this is what I need to focus on. This is what I need to do. So I think that's just an example of when you're truly out in the community, like for real, for real, you're going to meet people you don't have to look
00:08:12
Speaker
You know, like look, but if you're already involved and you're going to the things, then you will meet people. But that also shows your participants, your few participants and co-researchers that you're invested and interested for real. So that's pretty much how I got connected with them.
Ethnographic Research and Community Values
00:08:30
Speaker
OK, great. I love that you said that, too. It's like, go be a member of that community before you try to enter it as a researcher and build those connections organically, naturally, on a common or mutual interest. Yes, yes. And I think that is very important. And my students hear me say this, don't be extracted. I tell them that all the time. So coming from Flint, Michigan, Flint, Michigan has been very studied for a myriad of things. We're more than just the water crisis. I tell everyone that on another podcast again.
00:08:59
Speaker
But people would come in, you know, we have a university in our community, you have Michigan State, you have University of Michigan at Arbor, and these researchers would come from those campuses and come to Flint and study us, right, and leave. And then not only did you not hear anything about the work that they did,
00:09:18
Speaker
But what did you really get out of this whole process, this whole exchange? So that really influenced heavily me even going into my PhD program, the type of researcher I decided I did not want to be. I'm very informed by my community organizing work.
00:09:37
Speaker
And like one of the rules of community organizing is being in the community. And like I said, that's not just going to a meeting. That's like really being invested in the outcomes and the work and doing the work and getting your hands dirty.
00:09:50
Speaker
Right. So when it came to, obviously this was, this collaboration and this advocacy work was a part of your wider dissertation study. How did you specifically arrive to this paper blooming in the shafts? How did you arrive to and get the idea for, ooh, like I want to put together a piece on this topic.
Personal Experiences Influencing Research
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah. So I knew I wanted to do ethnography. I learned that about halfway through my PhD program. So I knew it was going to take me longer to finish. I knew that.
00:10:18
Speaker
And part of doing ethnography and doing One Will is, of course, journaling and documenting all of the interactions that you're having and everything. This situation came up with my son. She just so happened to come up. I was already part of this organization that was doing this work that was training parents in the community.
00:10:40
Speaker
about how to fight against the school-to-prison pipeline, how to decode the code of conduct, how to use it to your advantage, how to fight against it when it's unjust. So this just happened to my son. And I literally, these were journal entries that I wrote. And another reason the piece is important to me is because, of course, as my son, even thinking about what was happening at the time, like sometimes,
00:11:07
Speaker
makes me cry and I get very emotional about it because it hits so close to home. And so my research was not just a study separated from me, right? I was drawn into the research, not intending to do that. That's just what happened. And so I created this auto ethnographic piece from some of the journal entries that I wrote when I was doing the dissertation.
00:11:36
Speaker
working with ACBM when I was working with them. Okay, great. Do you mind sharing the story of what happened and what kind of the subsequent events that followed? I believe it happened before Christmas.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yep. So I think it was like September, October, I got a phone call from my son's school that he was being suspended. I remember talking to the principal in the office. He was like, you need to come here. You know, your son is going to be suspended. He was caught in the office vaping. And so I left directly, but
00:12:15
Speaker
While I left, when I got in the car, I remember opening up the code of conduct book and going through to look at suspension requirements and all that, the type of thing. And so by the time I got there, I was ready to deal with what was happening. I went in there and as you'll read in the piece,
00:12:34
Speaker
There was a police officer outside of the hallway, and first it was just me and the principal talking, and he was like, yeah, I've never seen Jay in here. Jay is such a great kid, you know what I'm saying? Everyone says that he's such a great kid, but we're going to suspend him for 10 days for doing this thing. I was like, whoa, back up.
00:12:54
Speaker
First of all, that's a disjuncture between being a great kid and you suspending her for 10 days and you need to tell me exactly what happened. And I asked Jay and Jay, he said he was caught in the bathroom with the substance, but I still push back. I was like, this was his first offense. And according to your code of conduct book, this is what you said. And so they ended up going lower with his suspension.
00:13:18
Speaker
But then they called the police officer into the room. It was like, oh, you can do this program. And as I said, the thing, I thought it was just going to be like a class at school. Like you have to stay after school, like for detention and take part of this drug, say no to drug type program. And that's not what it was. And my son had these charges put against him.
00:13:43
Speaker
in the police department. All this stuff happened and I didn't learn about that until like two or three months after the incident and after he had done his suspension time and I started panicking.
00:13:57
Speaker
and I connected with ACBM and told them what was going on and they helped me through the experience. But it was just a really hard time. And so it's an auto-ethnography, right? So any students reading this, I think what makes auto-ethnography so powerful, so many students think that they can't tell their story. And I think that you absolutely can tell your story and you need to put that story inside of the larger context, right? And there were so many things already happening
00:14:26
Speaker
The Ahmaud Arbery murder happened around that time. There were so many things happening. So I was already on edge with my son. So I just wrote about those experiences and my feelings about what was happening and my feelings about one, wanting to prove myself a good mother.
00:14:47
Speaker
Right. Like when they caught me into the office, it was like, Oh, but I'm a good mother. Oh, but I'm in a PhD program. Oh, but I'm, because already you're on defense. Any mother is, but I think you write it as you wrote it as value signaling. Yeah. I definitely, I think any mother is when your child or any parent, when your child is in trouble.
00:15:08
Speaker
but as a black woman of a black slant, right? It's like, I think times 10, because already you have assumptions about me and my child. Because if he had never been in trouble before, he was such a good kid, then why would you give such an extreme punishment?
00:15:23
Speaker
right for non-violent offense. I just don't understand that. That was something that struck me because you write about in this opening narrative that it was like boom 10 day out of school and it seemed rather quickly that he responds quote okay well we can do five days out of school and five days in school coming today.
00:15:44
Speaker
Like it was almost an arbitrary number. Like he was just throwing out a number to the wind and maybe perhaps is not used to other parents pushing back on what the discipline should be. So in this moment, you're negotiating the consequence where fortunately you were knowledgeable and new. Let me look at this student handbook before I go in here, right? But it seemed maybe because you came with very set intentions that they buckled and reduced it by half to me. That's a big, that's a big drop.
00:16:14
Speaker
You know, exactly, right? Which shows just how arbitrary these punishments are, right? That you can have one child and they get a warning and you can have another child and they get suspended for 10 days, or you can have another child and they get expelled, right? It can be that extreme. And so that's what I was able to use. I will work on another piece in the future. There was another incident in the future. Ultimately,
00:16:39
Speaker
at the end of this story, which I, of course, could not fit in here. My son faced another suspension and a whole other school. This happened when we lived where I was getting my PhD. Once I got the job and now I'm at the university and my son's in another school, they tried to suspend him again. And they did exactly what you just said, right? They wanted to give him so many days' suspension.
00:17:00
Speaker
And they were like, well, and then I push back. And I was like, no, according to your student handbook, it says that it's supposed to be a graduated consequence. And this is, again, his first offense. But you're jumping the five-day suspension or whatever they said in that instance. And then went to zero suspension in that instance and just had me come in for three days. They said, well, if you come and follow him to class for three days, and I said, OK.
00:17:23
Speaker
they didn't expect me to say, okay, right? Because they don't expect parents to be able to have that flexibility. Luckily, I'm a college professor. I can take the time off. I can come up here and follow him. And ironically, following him is what made me pull him out of school, ultimately. Because what I saw, or didn't see, happening in the classrooms,
00:17:44
Speaker
Right? And teachers, some of the teachers would walk up to me and apologize. Well, this is the reason we do this. Why are you apologizing to me? Why are you giving me excuses? Because if I wasn't here, you wouldn't be saying anything will be business as usual. This tells me how things run every day.
00:17:59
Speaker
The whole thing really has me focused and my research focuses largely on black student exclusion, black exclusion period, black teachers out of schools, black students out of schools, black families out of schools.
Exclusion of Black Students and 'Mother Work'
00:18:11
Speaker
Because you have schools that will not allow you to go into the school unless they want to punish the parent. They brought me in in that second incident as a punishment, not only to my son, but to me, because obviously, again, I'm not a good mother.
00:18:24
Speaker
Right. And so I'm really interested in how we push back against that to
00:18:32
Speaker
Reform the system is an overused word. I don't even like using that terminology because on some levels I am at the point where I'm like the system is so disreputable and so problematic that I'm not sure that there's any salvation in it. And what does it mean if we reimagine and we dream about a different type of education system that truly is for all children and is accepting of all children that is developmentally appropriate?
00:19:01
Speaker
Hey, and so young people, a parent, I know, we tell our kids the same thing 50 times. And as they get older, it actually gets easier. But they have certain stages, and it seems like some of these schools don't understand that. And so they punish our children as a consequence. And then that makes our children have a bad relationship with schools. And as a parent, period, as a mother, we have to decide what our response will be.
00:19:30
Speaker
and how we're going to make it better, not just for our own children, but as an other mother, right? As an other mother of our community children. Right. That brings me to my next point because I really enjoyed the piece by weaving through your personal experiences and through these narratives, also with certain theoretical framings that informed your analysis. In particular, the section under mother work and deservedness,
00:19:55
Speaker
Quote, my ontological home place is mother. Long before I became a biological mother, I engaged in the mother work of my community as described by Collins, 1994, centering my mental, spiritual, and physical efforts toward the work of uplifting and empowering children and the members of my communal village. Quote.
00:20:14
Speaker
So when I discover what mother work was, so again, coming from community work and community building and that type of thing, there's a lot of things that we talk about at academia, like it's mother's milk and some new invention that has actually always existed.
00:20:30
Speaker
in the community organizing world. If you do any type of community work, this is what they've always done. This is how Ida B. Wells moved. This is how Angela Davis moved. This idea that you care for your entire community. And so you have to put in the labor.
00:20:48
Speaker
And Patricia Hill Collins wrote about what that labor looks like, why it is we're doing that labor, for its environment, so its identity, all those sorts of things, which is exactly true, and I think as researchers.
00:21:02
Speaker
that we have to really look at why we're doing what we're doing, which again, which is why ethnography is so powerful to me. And I know there's many critiques of it, but ethnography really allows you the space to be involved in a way that I think a lot of different types of methodologies do not allow for, because they just don't have the room. They just don't have the room. It just is what it is. And flexibility for that matter to be creative and being able to use the eye in your work.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. So you're doing critical ethnographic work. You're doing auto ethnographic work because you cannot separate yourself as the researcher from the research that you are doing.
00:21:44
Speaker
Again, the idea of being invested and that investment has an impact on you. Even if that thing hadn't happened to my son, it still was having an impact on me because I was seeing the work that they were doing with other mothers and other children, including their own children. And I had to acknowledge the impact that the work they were doing
00:22:03
Speaker
was having and how it is I was approaching my study. At every point, I tell my students, at every point, everyone wants to know what's the right answer. What is the right answer? Am I doing this the right way? Well, there's no one particular way to do it. And actually, if you're doing it well, it shouldn't be like a cookie cutter. We should see it organically move and change if you're doing it well.
00:22:28
Speaker
That's what I was about to say, that you go through a series of ethical dilemmas of how you want to present your participants and represent their stories in your work, but then also what commitments and more obligations do you have to your own work, and not only as a researcher, but also as a community member and your case also as a mother.
00:22:46
Speaker
So that's what I actually wanted to ask you now is, did you have an ethical dilemma in, oh, do I want to share this story? Do I want to print this story? Is that a conversation you have to discuss with your son? Tell me about that process to decide whether or not to share it all. Yeah. So my son has been the topic more than one.
00:23:10
Speaker
And I think that's interesting because I definitely create on all of my children, but he's my only son. And I will say this, I think that his experience as a black boy has been
00:23:24
Speaker
an outlier, but not an outlier. It's been an outlier in my household, but not an outlier socially because we know the data, right? Black boys will be suspended three to five times more than their white counterparts, seven, eight times more than girls, so on and so on. We can go on and on with that. So he was kind of used to me like before I used his artwork.
00:23:49
Speaker
I use his artwork. Actually, I'm working on that piece now. So that was fine, but this was a little more personal. So I did have to talk to him about it before I did my dissertation today. I had to say, okay, Jay, so this is what I'm doing, and this is what I've included.
00:24:08
Speaker
Because the auto-ethnographic pieces were not the whole of my dissertation. They were just portions. So I could have done the whole thing and not spoke about it at all. But I felt that experience really encapsulated the study in general. And so I asked him and he said it was fine. The only thing he told me he did not like. And I had to read it before. I don't know if he missed this part. He said, Mommy, you told him that I had eczema and I needed a little stress.
00:24:40
Speaker
She read it before I came, it's anybody. But out of everything, that's what he said.
00:24:53
Speaker
I said, I'm sorry, honey. Hey, at least we know now what type of lotion he likes, right? Right, right. But the reason it was funny, but that part was important to me to write that in there because it showed his humanity.
00:25:11
Speaker
because we dehumanize children of color so much and especially black boys. They become monsters, they become adults before they are adults and we demonize them. And I just wanted to show.
00:25:27
Speaker
that not only is he human, but he is my sweet boy, right? He's my sweet boy. And so that to me was, I just thought of what he was a baby and that's why I put that in there. Yeah, I thought that was a sweet and tender moment of the story as well, because it describes your driving, you know, you have tears welling up in your eyes, you see any lotion, you're still trying to mother him and care for him, even though you're driving to this school, dealing with these consequences.
00:25:56
Speaker
And you know you're feeling anger, but then what you say is actually that anger is more fear.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah. Oh no, exactly. Like really scared. And I'm not sure if that
Parenting Challenges in Systemic Contexts
00:26:06
Speaker
fear goes away. I don't think it does. And I didn't have the fear. Like once my son started coming of age, like eight, nine, 10 and getting older and when he turned 13 was when we really started having issues because he shot up. You know, he was short, little and then he just shot up like one summer and I was like, whoa, what happened? And
00:26:31
Speaker
the schools did start treating him differently. Nothing else changed. He just got taller. And I started living in this zone of fear and concern. And like I spoke about in the piece, like just really trying to drill in his head. And he had heard that from me before. That was not the first time. I just think I said it more intently about how it is. You have to be better. You have to be perfect because you can't make any mistakes. And that really is
00:27:00
Speaker
sad commentary on our society that there are some children that cannot be children, that cannot make the mistakes that children make, right? And they get to do those things. And yes, there are consequences, but they should not be life altering to the extent that it can follow you the rest of your life and set you up to consistently have to deal with the judicial system. And unfortunately, that's the situation that we have in this country right now.
00:27:26
Speaker
So given all the knowledge and the information that you had because you're obviously pursuing a PhD, you're working with this group of black mothers or you're reading the statistics and to see it happen in your own home, tell me about the emotions you experience as a black mother who is trying to maybe at some points you feel it's removed, but then in this point it's like, no, this is in my home and I'm experiencing this. It's an anger and a fear that I'm burdened with every day.
00:27:56
Speaker
Right, right. I think it, so this is funny, ironically. Tim Wise, I heard Tim Wise be able to talk.
00:28:03
Speaker
at some conference I was at. But he was talking about how he erased his children. He was speaking about his daughter, I believe. And I'm not going to say what she did. But she said something that was racially problematic. And he was like, how does this happen in my house? I am who I am. And they hear this and that. And he was like, what I realize is that it seeps into your house like a ghost through the windows. And there's nothing you can do to wholly protect everything.
00:28:31
Speaker
And I think that's how I felt about what was going on with Jay, which is why I brought up the deservedness thing. I think that in the Black community, there is a history of believing that if we are good enough, if we are high enough, we will be able to escape certain things. If we don't draw attention to ourselves, then certain things will bypass us. But that, in fact, is not the case, because it is like the air. And it's going to come into your house some kind of way
00:29:01
Speaker
And that's how I felt. And it was like, how do you protect yourself from the air? How do I protect my son from that?
00:29:08
Speaker
All the things, right? And I can't. As involved as I try to be, and I'm at the school all the time, my kids know it, my daughter, both my daughters are like, mom, why do you have all the teacher's phone numbers in your phone? Because that's my job, and you think you do those things, and it still doesn't matter. Things will still happen, and they still can face such dire consequences that they could not be on this earth anymore, because
00:29:34
Speaker
they fell asleep in a car or because they took a jog or because they were bathing in a bath. Exactly, right? Yeah, there was this moment that really struck me, quote, I am sure I've sounded like a mad woman to him. I just desperately needed him to understand that he can't be a kid anymore. It felt like a psychologically abusive, developmentally inappropriate, but sadistically necessary conversation, end quote.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that is what makes it so maddening is because it's not healthy for anyone in the entire situation, right? It's not healthy for me.
00:30:16
Speaker
because there's this vicarious racism, there's this vicarious trauma that happens historically in the Black community. Lynching was effective to keep the Black community quiet because you were sure that people walking by and driving by would see the effects. Even though it didn't happen to you, it might not have been your child or your son, but you see the effects.
00:30:38
Speaker
We have that in our school system when students are punished in particular ways, even the students and there's research on this, the kids in the classroom face some type of vicarious trauma just by watching it, even though they're not the ones who are getting punished at all. And I think it creates
00:30:59
Speaker
For my son and not just my son, other mothers who I interviewed during my dissertation study, the anger that their children felt towards the school system. They were angry and it saddens me because I love education. I love knowledge as a pursuit.
00:31:19
Speaker
but because of some of these things I have had with my children, separate the pursuit of knowledge from schooling and make sure they understand the difference, right? You can go get smarter, you can go get your education, you can read all the books, you can do all these things, but this institution is not the only place that you can get these things. And that is sad because this institution should be a place where all children are welcome.
00:31:45
Speaker
I am relatively privileged, which I work with in a piece, right? So yes, I'm a black woman, I'm a black mother, I'm a single mother. I have a mess, so sometimes I'm disabled, sometimes I'm able by, who knows what the baby brings. But I have this job that I can take three days off of work to go sit in a classroom, my son every day.
00:32:04
Speaker
where I can take the space to do all this type of research to advocate for my children, where I have access to different people who do this type of work. So I have a ton of privilege in that way. It doesn't matter. All the privilege in the world does not shield you.
00:32:24
Speaker
I think that sometimes our children look at that and say, so then why are we even here? Like, why are we
Homeschooling Decision and Stereotypes
00:32:31
Speaker
even in the system? Because mama, I see you and you're doing this, but this is still happening, right?
00:32:38
Speaker
And it's hard to answer that. It's hard to answer that question. And so we have children who are angry, like we have parents who are angry and who have lost hope and have lost faith in the school system. And that's why I say that the idea of reformation, of reforming it, is not extreme enough, is not drastic enough. And so we really need to question what it is we need to do as a school institution. I work at a public university, so they have things to answer to as well in higher ed.
00:33:08
Speaker
We see the same type of things, the same type of patterns. There's push-out and higher ed as well. And it is disparate, racially, ability-wise, gender-wise, sexual orientation-wise, all the things that you see in K-12 and higher ed too. So it's the whole system. So we need to call into question in the whole system and say, how do we change these things? And as a researcher, what is my role to make it better? What is my job?
00:33:33
Speaker
What's what can I contribute to that revolution or that rebuilding? Yes. And I think there was one thing that made me it seemed like interesting to me as well as this idea of the jogs. Right. Or he would go on these morning jogs. And initially he's doing those by himself. But then now you feeling responsibility, especially after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. And now you need to ride in the car and follow him.
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And as I wrote in the piece, I asked him about it. He was like, oh, I just thought you were making sure. So he felt like a kid, right? My mom's just making sure I do it. She thinks I'm not going to do it. She thinks I'm going to be sneaky. And that at all was not what I was thinking. I think I gave him my watch or something. So I could already track where he was at, what he was doing. But it just was different. Because if you're somewhere, I see where you're at.
00:34:32
Speaker
on my watch or on my phone through the watch and something happens, I'm not there. I can't get there soon enough. And isn't that a horrible wait for a parent to have to carry that your kids can't even jog around the corner or whatever without you worrying that at the time I was living on campus, without you worrying about campus police?
00:34:55
Speaker
pulling them over and questioning them and making sure that they live there actually. Why are you here? You know, sort of thing. Is there a part of you in those moments where you're like, yeah, no more dogs. Like, oh, we're not going to do this. We only probably did it for a little bit longer afterwards. And then we stopped because I felt like he had started learning his lesson. Right. Right. Like I said, it shouldn't be that way. No. So, yeah.
00:35:24
Speaker
So now that you've had some time to reflect and look back on the experience, has it changed your perspective at all on what's happened? And do you notice any differences in the fact that you've been able to have these deep conversations with your son? Do you notice any differences in how he perceives some of his experiences? Yeah, so I ended up finishing homeschooling him. His senior year, he was homeschooled.
00:35:52
Speaker
And he had a graduation and he did a senior presentation online and we invited people because at that point I was fed up, like I was fed up. And as I said in the piece, I'm an educator, like I have all the tools, I don't need to do this. And at the time, this is the other thing, COVID was happening.
00:36:14
Speaker
at the time COVID was happening and the schools had shut down. So by the time I had finished my PhD program and got my job that I currently have now, schools had opened back up and then he went again and then he had an inlet situation. So I just pulled him out. But going through COVID,
00:36:35
Speaker
And the shutdowns during COVID revealed a lot to me. And I also think to him, because even what the school at the time was doing was I felt insufficient. It was insufficient. And I try to give the school's grace because everybody was scrambling around, not knowing what to do. And all of a sudden, kids are all in online school.
00:36:59
Speaker
And when I saw that, I was just like, we can do this better. So that was our test run. So then when that situation happened again, we were off to the races and he was excited.
00:37:13
Speaker
That really became. And mind you, this was with a lot of pushback, because you also wrote about that a lot of people were like, you're busy enough. Like, you're going to take this on. You're trying to finish your PhD. You're trying to get a job. You've got this. You've got that. And you were showing your courage against homeschooling. So that was another dilemma you faced. Yes. Yes. All of those issues. Plus, again, as black parents and a mother of a black son, the assumption is, is if you homeschool him,
00:37:41
Speaker
he will not be as highly regarded as the other kids who graduated from not really good high school, right? Whatever high school it is, because we assume because they have that paper that it was a good experience and they learn things. But I will say this, when I started homeschooling him the second time, like when we were just like, we're done, we're just doing this, this is what we're doing full-time period.
00:38:08
Speaker
For the first time, my son would come to dinner having conversations about the topics that we had talked about in school.
00:38:16
Speaker
He had never come to dinner to talk about topics that he was talking about in his regular school. I think that education and school system is necessary because there will always be children who do not have the privileges that my son has, that my children have, where I can put together a curriculum and I have all this knowledge that I can pull from and I know how to use technology and all this other stuff. They don't have that.
00:38:42
Speaker
So we have to make sure that the system works better than how it worked for my son. So that those kids also come to the dinner table talking about the topics. I didn't have to pull it out of him. He just came. Jay would tell me, mommy, you didn't put up my homework.
00:38:58
Speaker
Oh, let me get on it. Let me get on this right now. And that's what it should be, right? That's what it should look like. And so you asked me, would I do anything differently?
00:39:13
Speaker
In terms of the research, I wouldn't do anything differently. Things that I thought weren't going to work out ended up working out. Because COVID happened, I thought that was going to be like the demise of my study because I was like in the middle of it and hadn't interviewed everybody yet and all this other stuff. And it shut down a lot of meetings that mothers were having and stuff. It just was a lot going on. But it did not end everything. And if anything, it showed me some new avenues
00:39:43
Speaker
in terms of using technology, especially things like Zoom, which is much better than it was in 2019, right? 2020, 2021. And so I think that it was all a learning experience. That just tends to be my view on life in general. I have very few redos. I don't know if I have any redos. So that's the same way I feel about the research.
00:40:08
Speaker
Okay, what about this one? In the paper you wrote about how, even though you had the student handbook and you were part of this initiative, that you didn't initially go to the group of the organization of the Black mothers, right? And when you went, they asked, like, why didn't you tell us about this whole situation earlier? And you said, I thought I could handle it. But then you said, in my head, I was ashamed and embarrassed. I was. So that goes back to when I had that initial meeting with the principal, right? This wanting to prove
00:40:38
Speaker
that I am a good mother. And again, it was questioned again when we went to meet the probation officer, and they said I had to go to a parenting class. And I didn't even want to go into it. I was like, lady, I taught parenting class. Like, what are you talking about?
00:40:56
Speaker
So, it's always having to prove your work constantly and not wanting, even the people who you know, wanting to shield yourself and guard what's happening in your house because you don't want anybody to think that something's wrong with you.
00:41:12
Speaker
again as a black single mother. So I'm all the stereotypes, right? This is just that my name is doctor in front of me. You take that away. I'm just still this black woman who got multiple kids. So of course she is not going to be sufficient as a mother. And so you're always subconsciously, even if you don't know it, you're always fighting to prove
00:41:37
Speaker
that wrong. Heaven forbid you have people in your life and unfortunately I have who question you as a mother and you shouldn't have done this, you shouldn't have done that, you're not a good mother. So I think that
00:41:51
Speaker
Black women, absolutely, but I think mothers in general, women, mothers in general, are always trying to prove our worth, are always trying to prove that we're good enough, which is why you see all the health issues that you see with women. They're overworked, they're overburdened, they're trying to work all the hours and be at every event for the kids and ever forbid you miss something. And I just had to, in my mind,
00:42:15
Speaker
keep up this rat race of, no, but I got it. I didn't want them to think, hey, hey. Even if it is with other black women that you feel identified with and you feel communicative, there is still a sense of, ooh, but like, I got this. Let me show them that I got this. I can handle it.
00:42:32
Speaker
Right. I don't do it for myself. Yeah. And the other thing, so I will say this group of Black mothers, and I didn't reveal this in the piece, a lot of them were older, right? So they were kind of like mothers to me. So it was that dynamic just because they were older in the Black community, the elder dynamic. They were older Black women who many of them had adult children, already had grandchildren.
00:42:58
Speaker
And here I come and I'm having this issue with my son, this new age issue of him, vaping, what's vaping. And like I said, I was kind of embarrassed and trying to prove myself to them because it was also that dynamic, even though they were black women.
00:43:17
Speaker
But a mother is like, you always come to me, right? And you come to me. So if you're at the party and you drank too much, you call me. We'll talk about you drinking later, but you call me to come and pick you up. And so it was that dynamic there as well. So did you feel like they would, in a way, try to mother you as well? Yeah. Yeah. But I think sometimes I needed it, right? And there's nothing wrong with that, I think.
00:43:46
Speaker
Like you'll get beyond to a whole other thing. But I think as a society, we all want to believe or we're led that we should believe we can do it ourselves. And we can't, like we just can't. And sometimes it's good to have like those elders or wiser voices. They don't always have to be older. Just wiser voices who have experience to help guide you and talk to you and talk you through things. Even if you think you got it all and know everything. Yeah.
00:44:14
Speaker
OK, great. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's very important to hear and to learn from. I'd like to touch on the methods a little bit, specifically how you approach journaling, any strategies or tips for how you documented your experiences, what were your routines like, habits, how you organized your journals, and then how you perhaps revisited them later to get the idea to structure this piece.
Research Methods and Reflections
00:44:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So that again was a whole process. So I probably tried all of the things when I first started. So I ended up settling on Evernote. I used Evernote to do a lot of note taking to upload my audio recording. So what I would do is after I would do an in-depth interview. So I interviewed 10 mothers.
00:45:01
Speaker
And they each did three in-depth interviews. The first one was focused on a oral history and more of a narrative format, talking about themselves, their lives. And then also, oral history and that. I asked about certain historical moments that may have taken place in their life. I'm like, what was your racial moments? How did you feel about the Rodney King beat? Did your family talk about that?
00:45:27
Speaker
That sort of stuff. The second interview was about their experiences as a mother, if they had experience to push out with their children and their experiences working with the organization.
00:45:39
Speaker
And then the last one was referencing kind of the first two, how they felt they were connected, the first two interviews. And then I had the mothers create, created what I call creative expression pieces. So I created a prompt off of the first two interviews. After I did those, I created like a prompt question. And I think my question, if I remember correctly, was how do you view yourself as a black mother in connection with your children and school system?
00:46:06
Speaker
You had to visualize or use art to describe that connection. What would it look like? And so that's what they did. And some wrote poetry, some wrote prose, some painted, did collage.
00:46:19
Speaker
And so they did that. So that third interview, we also talked about their art piece, whatever they chose to do for their artwork. So they brought it to the third interview and they presented it. Yeah, I had already received it. And so we talked about it in that third interview. And so after every interview, I would record my response.
00:46:38
Speaker
because I didn't want to wait. So I would go to my car after the interview and I would hit record on my phone or on my recorder and I would just talk. And then it would go from talk to text, you know, apps, which you still have to go through and fix and everything. So I would do that in terms of some of my analytic memory.
00:46:59
Speaker
during data collection. I also interviewed 12, I believe, community members who had done work with this organization to talk about what the community's perspective was on the organization if they thought they were not doing enough or if they were doing too much or, you know, how they had impacted their lives as well. So same process, record. I only did one interview with community members, though.
00:47:27
Speaker
The other thing I did was the journaling. And so the journaling was not every single day. The journaling was when something came up or if I would think of something and do a research, you start dreaming about your restart. You wake up and you know. Sometimes these aha moments just strike you and you're like, I'm waking up. I need to write this down. Yes. So you write that down and
00:47:54
Speaker
So we had the creative artistic pieces, we had the in-depth interviews. I also took my, as I started coming up with like my cursory themes and some of my themes and gave it back to the participants. A group of them met, I would say about eight to 10. All of them were not ones I had interviewed, but they were all part of the organization.
00:48:16
Speaker
which I thought made it even better, the fact that outside eyes who had not gone through the interview process participated in helping us to go through the data.
00:48:26
Speaker
to see what they thought the things were. I thought that was really interesting. And so we did that. And then we had what I called a cipher. So it is a method I'm working on, so no one steal it. We're first. Yes. And so with the cipher, pretty much what I did is I had done artwork with young people. And that's the piece I'm working on now.
00:48:50
Speaker
back home in Flint, Michigan, that had been suspended. Students would experience suspension, and they created art pieces. And so to prep the mothers for the cipher, I showed them the art pieces that the young people had created, and it was 10 different pieces.
00:49:09
Speaker
And all this was on Zoom, right? So this is during COVID. Now the cipher, when COVID happened, I thought my cipher was over because this is not how I envisioned it. I was going to have like a community type thing and food. And it was all about like connecting so that they would be ready to talk.
00:49:27
Speaker
And none of that happened. I had to do it on Zoom. So it still ended up working out probably maybe even better. And I'll tell you why. So let me go back. So the cypher is like a focus group without the input of the researcher. The only thing I do and how I describe it is a cypher. If you know anything about hip hop, a cypher is when you have two lyricists and they supposed to go off the top of the head or off the dome and just spit rhymes.
00:49:56
Speaker
So you don't know, you're not supposed to know what the topic is. Now back in the day when I was at Flint, we used to do ciphers and people would like put up a topic and that's what you had to rap about. In every round, it would be a different topic and that's what you had to rap about. But the point being is that it just came off the head. There was no rehearsal, you didn't practice, you didn't write it down, you're not supposed to. So that's why I named it a cipher because what I did is I took all of the participants, put them in a group or in the Zoom at the time,
00:50:25
Speaker
and dropped one thing into the circle. And that thing was whatever question I came up with from the other interviews, from all the interviews and all the data I had at that point, I created a question and then they talked about the question and I stepped out, I was done. So you would drop it in the chat and then they take over. That's it, that's it. So when we did it on Zoom, I prepped them because it took away
00:50:53
Speaker
The idea was we would be in person, and they would see the artwork. I was going to get all the artwork printed off, and they would walk around and look at the artwork. And they didn't do that, but we just still showed the artwork on Zoom. And they took a few minutes to look at each piece, to think about it, write notes if they want to, whatever they wanted to do. And then I dropped the question, and then I stepped out. So the reason I say Zoom might have worked better is because literally they didn't even see me.
00:51:18
Speaker
I blacked myself out and then they just started talking to the point that I think they forgot I was there for real because it was like two and a half hours. They're all talking about you. You know that, Don. It wasn't that bad. No. So so no. So it really worked well. And the reason I wanted to set up the cipher like that, the idea behind the cipher that I'm working on
00:51:48
Speaker
is that it helped me to hear what they thought was important about what had happened. So I can go back to my themes and say, are these really themes? Or am I just seeing things that maybe I shouldn't be seeing? But when they were luckily talking about the things I was talking about, and some other things, right? Like my dissertation can be forever long, but it definitely gave me things to go back to.
00:52:14
Speaker
So, that was the cipher, that was like the final piece. And I coded throughout at every stage because I had so much data. I said there was 30, a couple of mothers I'll probably be at four interviews with. So, we're looking at like 43 different interviews, right? There's no way you're coding that in one city. So, as I was going, I was starting the coding process and yeah.
00:52:38
Speaker
No, I love that. So it was a long process. Yes, no, I love that. I love the idea that you're discussing of the cipher. I did a little something somewhat similar, but in using theater, a table read and having non participants read through the data, read through selections.
00:52:54
Speaker
code it with me and pick what they thought they identified with, what was interesting, what was compelling, and write comments and notes on it. I thought that was super interesting and powerful to hear other youth perspectives on what the youth participants were saying. Yes. Yeah, I really love that.
00:53:12
Speaker
But one that I had also, as far as now, you have all these journal entries. You're going through the data. You're obviously doing a variety of other different data collection and analytic procedures. How do you now decide to layer this with certain theories, specifically Mother Work, Black Crit, and Maroonage? So the Mother Work and Black Crit was already part of my dissertation. OK.
00:53:39
Speaker
So it just made sense to go forward. And of course it was applicable, but maroonage. So I started learning more about that. So I know historically about that, my undergrad is in sociology and Africana studies. So I know what maroons are. I already knew what they were. So I did that there was a theory.
00:54:02
Speaker
around maroonage, and they're starting to develop that theory in educational settings and what that means. Pretty much this idea that you create a safe space. Black folks create a safe space so that they can be their whole full selves, but even
00:54:25
Speaker
maroons still had to be mindful how close they were to plantations, right? There still were people walking around and you could be seen. So this idea that there's not ever truly a disconnect from the larger system, whatever system it is, the educational system. And so in this piece, like, and I'm sure you'll get to it, the struggle I had about homeschooling Jay, even when I decided
00:54:55
Speaker
the second time around, I'm gonna do that, or the first time that I wrote about it here, like, what does that mean? If I say, I believe in education for all children, and I pull my son out because of this situation, what does that mean? What am I saying? Right? And so that was a struggle, and in some ways it still is. So when I discover that this theory, or this idea around maroonage,
00:55:25
Speaker
To me, it was like this middle area because it's really hard to separate from the system wholesale. You can't. You really can't. Even when you homeschool your children, at least in the state of Arizona,
00:55:39
Speaker
You have to fill out a form, right? You have to go to the Capitol or wherever in the world I had to go and fill out paperwork so they can know that that's what you're doing. And so they're still tracking you. They still know what you're doing. You're still in some ways accountable to the system.
00:55:59
Speaker
And I kept track of everything. I used to tell Jay all the time. I was like, you don't know if they're going to come and want to make sure that I'm doing what I'm saying I'm going to do. So I'm keeping track of everything. We're keeping evidence of everything that's happening. So that's why I used maroonage, this idea that I'm creating this haven. But the haven can only go so far. In many ways, you're still connected.
00:56:26
Speaker
to the wider system, but you are utilizing some agency. Like I said, you will not have my son because the system is you still get money off of my son if he's in the school system. So you get money off of my child that you are not servicing who you want to put out of school. Do I get a discount for those days that he's not in school? Like so I can pay, you know, which is crazy that it should come down to that. But we live in a capitalist society. So
00:56:53
Speaker
We need to question, and like I said, that was the tension in myself about what am I saying, I believe, about education. Because I still believe in the idea of education. I say the idea because unfortunately, the education system has not been for disenfranchised, marginalized children of all colors, ilks, and everything else, what it should be. It just hasn't been. And I think until it's honest about that and really face up to that, that there can be no change.
00:57:23
Speaker
So that's how Maroonish came about. Okay. So it sounds like it was this iterative process of I'm reading and I'm writing and I'm going to have life experience and I'm collecting research for a study, but then I'm having my own life experience and then I'm journaling and then I'm returning to reading and then just all of this process, be able to formulate and arrive to this piece. No, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm a Gemini, so it sounds about right.
00:57:52
Speaker
Layers. Layers. For people who are interested in writing a piece similar in the style that you did of weaving in auto-ethnographic narratives with these theoretical reflections.
00:58:08
Speaker
I think reflection is so important. And as researchers, you either need to record your reflection or write them down. If you record them, they need to be turned to text because we will forget things. We will forget trains of thought. We will have these really wonderful ideas and then lose it. I've done it before. So I just think the practice of reflection is so important, especially if you're doing autoethnography. You have to be very reflective.
00:58:39
Speaker
And you have to pay attention.
Challenges and Need for Educational Change
00:58:41
Speaker
So again, to me, that's like an ethnographic skill. To be a good ethnography, you have to be good at observing. You have to be a people watcher, really, is what you're doing and take notes. And if you're doing
00:58:53
Speaker
I was doing participant observation. So I have to be able to participate and pay attention to what's happening and take note to have whatever it is I need have set up to record all of the things. So you have to be able to just be flexible in that way to have, I think this type of like layered, I consider it to be like layered collection of data, which will give you a more nuanced analysis of what is happening.
00:59:23
Speaker
and what is going on. You have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to all the things.
00:59:28
Speaker
Okay, thank you. So very quickly, I want us to play a little game called In My Expert Opinion. So I was scared of this game. When I saw that you wanted to do it, I said, oh my goodness. Trust me, the concepts come from your paper. So you'll be great. You'll be fantastic. So I'm just going to, I just want you to give your hot take or initial reaction on the matter. And you can briefly give a few words on your rationale. Okay.
00:59:53
Speaker
Number one, so parents reading student handbooks, especially parents of BIPOC young people. Thoughts? It's necessary. They have to do it. I think that me going through the training that I went through with ACBM,
01:00:09
Speaker
really highlighted something that I had never thought about, like reading the student handbook. It's the most boring thing in the world. It is, and I think they intentionally make it so doldrum so that no one wants to finish it. It's like the things at the end of your cell phone plan that nobody's reading that, you just merguy accept. And for all you know, they're gonna like take your heart into once. You have no idea. So it is to your benefit that you read the student handbook
01:00:37
Speaker
and that you know it, and that not only that you know it to utilize it, but you know it because I think you need to advocate if there are some things in there that need to be changed, right? If there are things that are unjust in the student handbook. For an example, Tucson Unified School District, if I may,
01:00:57
Speaker
is putting, or has, or is in the process of putting in their handbook that offenses to students follow them throughout their whole band, right? So like if they're in elementary school. Or record, essentially. Yeah, so it follows them all the way through elementary. And then they go to middle school and they start over again. So if you can have an offense in kindergarten, that's one. You can have an offense in second grade, that's two. You can have an offense in fourth grade, that's three. Three strikes and they can tell you're out. And that is,
01:01:27
Speaker
Is that child developmentally appropriate? It is not. It is an unjust rule. It is an unjust thing that they have in the student code of conduct. So I think as parents and as community members, we have the obligation
01:01:42
Speaker
to push, to change those things, to correct them. Because at the end of the day, whether you're homeschooling kids or whatever, the lion's share of our children are in our public school system. So I think we should all be invested, period, in what is happening there to make sure that it's the best place that it needs to be for our children. So you have to know the rules. You have to know the rules that they've created. And you can't do that if you haven't read the children's code of conduct.
01:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost like you can use it as a secret weapon. You take their knowledge and their own language, know it's so good that you can throw it right back out and defend yourself or to spend your children or your young people. Exactly. Exactly. Number two, school push out and or school to prison pipeline.
01:02:22
Speaker
Wait, I gotta get two. No, I'm just kidding. A school push out or a school push out is a pipeline. It is something that unfortunately has not been rectified, if anything. I think that there was a moment where it seemed like we were going to do better. And there has been so much pushback, I think socially and politically.
01:02:45
Speaker
It has been pushed back against it that has also gone hand in hand with the counter CRT methods, with the book bans, with the anti-trans legislation, like all these things are connected. And if you are able to continue pushing students out of school and wipe your hands of them and say, well, it's not our fault.
01:03:06
Speaker
that there will never be any accountability on the part of the system, and that our children will always be lost by the wayside. So Angela Davis said, freedom is a constant struggle, and it is. I don't think it is a battle that will ever go away, because I think that systems will always seek to put people out that they don't desire to be there. And they will just retrofit ways to do it differently. And unfortunately, I think we're going backwards in terms of school and prison pipeline. So we need to keep fighting in terms of that. OK.
01:03:37
Speaker
Number three, SROs or school resource officers in school. I'll give my short hot take unnecessary. They have never saved a life during a school shooting. If anything, I think they
01:03:50
Speaker
promote more of a violent culture inside of schools. That would be like me saying, my home is a pleasant place, and the culture in my home is love. And then I have the security officer at the door with a gun. It does not go hand in hand. So we have to decide what is the true culture that we want in schools. And the rhetoric that we have coming out of our mouths is not matching up with the actions that we show when we put millions of dollars into SOR officers. But we don't have college and therapy counselors in the schools.
01:04:19
Speaker
We don't have full banks. We don't have simple things like having social services. A social services office inside of every school, I think, should be inside of schools. There should be a social service person there to help families who need help and need connection with things. So instead of putting money into that sort of a thing, we put in SROs and think we're going to scare our kids into properly behaving. And that is now how it goes, because what our kids need are not guns.
01:04:47
Speaker
Well said. Two more. Number four, Black mothers joining parent-based organizations. I think that, again, that is also necessary. I think that Black mothers, Black parents in general join any organization. I think on terms of part of the organization have a responsibility to know how to deal with parents from different cultures, not just Black parents, but any culture who comes in. So there has to be, you know, culturally
01:05:14
Speaker
cognizant, training, constant, just a thirst for knowledge and wanting to work with these communities instead of them coming in and unfortunately becoming tokens of organizations that they actually know how to work with different populations and to reach out to them and to keep them engaged and to be culturally cognizant.
01:05:39
Speaker
Okay, and last one, black sons or black children and their parents making the decision to homeschool. So again, you saw the tension that I had in the paper. I think that we're seeing more of it. There's no doubt about the research, the statistics, the data show us that and that we will continue to see that. Unfortunately, what I think will happen
01:06:04
Speaker
which does not bode well, not just for the black community, but for anybody, is that you will always have those who are more privileged, who could afford to homeschool their kids, who have the ability to either have someone at home with them, or like I do with my son, I brought him up to the college, will be every day. His school was his college, was this college, right? And so that was a wonderful benefit, but that is not the average parent, and it's not the average black parent.
01:06:29
Speaker
So I think we need to think through multiple options and that it can't just be homeschooling. Homeschooling can be one option. But again, like I said, we have to consistently and constantly fight for the public schools. It's going to be what we need it to be because I think the lion's share of our children will always go to public school, period. And so we need them to be just and truly loving and caring places. So I think homeschooling is a tool, but it's not the tool.
01:06:59
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you so much. Lastly, before I let you go, do you have any resources such as books, movies, texts, poetry, authors that you'd like to recommend to listeners who are interested in reading more on this topic?
01:07:12
Speaker
Okay, so I have a couple things. I would say, so I read Carol Alt's, All Our Kin, when I was an undergrad and she's a sociologist and it changed literally the trajectory of my study. I read Dr. Pedro de Guerra, who also like further cemented. So anything by Pedro de Guerra, what it is I was going to study.
01:07:41
Speaker
I read, oh goodness, what is his name? Matthew Desmond. He wrote Evicted, which is another ethnographic study that was wonderful. Just really interesting how he tried to stay as
01:07:57
Speaker
disconnected, but really, the more I researched the book, realizing that there were certain parts in the book where he will say, well, so-and-so gave someone a ride and it would be a name, but it was him. That was so interesting to me. Again, how if you're doing ethnographic work, especially around
01:08:16
Speaker
issues of justice that is hard as a researcher to say totally neutral and outside of that. Going into decolonizing ethnography is another book that I think is important. And I know Juarez, don't get me to lie about all the authors. It's about four different authors, but they talk about like really how ethnography can be this social justice tool, again, if done correctly with the researcher as a tool as well.
01:08:46
Speaker
There's a group. So those are books. Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia, another good book. I read that right before I started writing my dissertation. She studied a school district in San Francisco. So just really powerful. And to me, I thought the layering of analysis that she had in that book, I think would be a good example. Since anyone wanted to do educational ethnography.
01:09:12
Speaker
In terms of research, support, there are so many things. Like I said, I tried all the things, but online there's a group that I'm part of called Race Mentoring, and they are really good. It is for academics of color to receive support and get resources. There's so much I learned on there just by sitting and watching the other scholars interact that I did not know.
01:09:35
Speaker
And I wasn't a great program, but there were things that they didn't cover that I was able to get through race mentoring. So if you're on Facebook, I would say that would be a good group to check out. Okay, great. Thank you for those recommendations. And if you'll tell the listeners where they can find more information about you, social media, website,
01:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, so I do have a website. We are revamping it, but you can go look at it. www.dawndemps.com. I'm also on Facebook, just like in Dawn Demps. Also on Instagram, I think it's dr.dawn.m.demps. And that's, that's all really that I'm on, LinkedIn, but
01:10:16
Speaker
Okay, great. Thank you so much. You've truly been a blessing and a gift and you shared so much wisdom. And so I know a lot of people will benefit from listening and learning from you. So thank you again for being unwilling to learn. All right. Thank you so much for having me on. This is willing to learn.