Abstract
Keywords
It is the end of recess and almost time to return inside. On her way to line up by the door, Diamond notices a large rust-color metal square embedded in the concrete path and jumps on it. The sound her feet make gets her attention. As if testing it out, Diamond deftly positions her feet, gains momentum, and jumps again producing a vibrant sound. She jumps again now accompanying each bound with a triumphant grunt. Several classmates notice and start to mimic her movements and take turns on the metal insert. The students excitedly challenge each other to produce louder clanks or bigger jumps, now yelling “Oh yeah?” and then trying to jump higher and louder. Sierra low-heel shoes contribute “clink” sounds. Kamille's dancing beaded braids add excitement to the jumping symphony. Eventually, the teachers call the children to go back inside to their classroom. Diamond lingers, “Come on Diamond!” Ms. Louisa, the teacher assistant, calls. “Let's do one more!” Diamond answers. Diamond jumps one last time and then runs to join the snake-like line to go inside. (Civic Action Video, 28 April 2016) (Figure 1).
Introduction and Study Overview
Diamond is a four-year-old girl who turned idle waiting time into a shared experience of joy and scientific exploration. She jumped on the metal plate, discovered a sound, welcomed others into the activity, and then kept the experiment going with her delight and everyone's contributions. Diamond's actions of jumping on the metal, getting other children to participate, and doing “one more jump” could be interpreted as misbehavior, disrespect, or lack of executive function. Such misinterpretations are common for Black 1 children whose play is often controlled, disciplined, and criminalized (Morris, 2019; Bryan, 2021; Pikney et al., 2018). The suspicion and scrutinization of Black children's play, actions, and interactions are manifestations of antiblackness in early childhood education that limit Black children's ability to act upon their curiosity, enact their agency, or express their creativity to expand knowledge and capabilities (Boutte & Bryan, 2021; Dumas & ross, 2016; Jones et al., 2023; Williams, 2022). For Black girls in particular, a growing body of literature examines how norms of acceptable behavior and school policies are racialized and gendered to result in policing and overrepresentation in exclusionary discipline (Epstein et al., 2017; Morris, 2022; Zimmermann, 2018) that interrupt community, play, and Black girls’ knowledges.
Diamond initiating a communal game and scientific experiment on the metal plate.
Black girls’ capabilities remain understudied. There's a need for asset-based research that attends to their educational experiences and renders their capabilities legible. The purpose of this study is to document and make visible young Black girls’ multifaceted capabilities and what educational research, schools, and educators miss when their actions are ignored, misinterpreted, and shut down. We asked: (a) How do preschool Black girls use their agency to enact various community-building capabilities in their early childhood environments? (b) How do teachers interpret and respond to young Black girls’ actions in different preschool settings?
We identified community-building as initiating a communal activity or turning an individualized activity into a communal one while expanding various types of interdisciplinary knowledge and/or generating joyful engagements for oneself and peers. Agency has been conceptualized as the ability to: exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life (Bandura, 2001); be agents capable of choice and action that make a difference in one's circumstances (Martin et al., 2003); to shape ones daily life in various contexts and situations (Graham, 2007); and/or to influence and make decisions about how and what is learned to expand capabilities (Adair, 2014). This work centers how Black girls engage, negotiate, and at times resist power to influence and shape their preschool daily lives and learning in ways that are joyful and meaningful to them. We examined the ways Black girls used their agency individually and collectively with the understanding that a group can act together to produce shared desired outcomes that respond to collective needs, goals, and/or carries social responsibilities (Payne et al., 2020). We also paid attention to whether their contexts supported these agentic communal endeavors.
Black girlhood frameworks (Halliday, 2019) along with bell hooks’ theorizing of Engaged Pedagogy (1994) informed our analysis and were used to (a) highlight and analyze the creative performances and expressions of young Black girls—more particularly; (b) make legible their versatile and nuanced capabilities in communal knowledge-making; (c) challenge static pathologizing views of Black girlhood; (d) and examine contexts that support communal agency to stimulate young children's joyful and sophisticated knowledge-making. These frameworks informed the questions we posed in the research, what we paid attention to and documented in our descriptions and analysis of children's engagements. This study documents the capabilities of 11 Black girls in three PreK classrooms located in two large Texas cities—Diamond, Kamille, Angelica, Brittany, Alycia, Christel, Zanaya, Jackie, Makalynn, Alexis, and Abigail. 2 The 11 girls’ examples of community-building capabilities come from two large-scale, video-cued ethnographic studies that took place between 2016 and 2020. The Agency and Young Children Study (Adair, 2014) included filming in multiple PreK and first-grade classrooms across urban, border, and suburban Texas and was funded by the Foundation for Child Development. The Civic Action and Young Children Study (Adair et al., 2017) included filming in early childhood classrooms in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States and was funded by the Spencer Foundation. This article draws upon 45 hr of film footage from three of the Texas urban PreK classrooms to focus entirely on Black preschool girls. Because agency has been associated with empowerment and ownership of learning (View & Hanley, 2020), we carefully selected preschool spaces in which Black girls could use their agency, at least some of the time. We documented 60 strategies the young Black girls used for community-building. We also offer detailed narratives from each classroom—including Diamond's—to foreground and analyze their capabilities and how they were responded to in each context. These strategies and examples are neither exhaustive nor representative of all Black girls’ capabilities. Instead, they are examples of how asset-based liberatory lenses (e.gs., Pérez et al., 2022; Jones, in press) can allow educators and researchers to learn about and from Black girlhood in order to recognize, understand, and support their capabilities, their knowledge-making, well-being, and development.
All three classrooms analyzed in this study are in urban spaces within large, segregated cities in Texas and two can be codified as
Diamond's Capabilities: Initiating a Community-Oriented Game with Joy and Curiosity
In the introductory vignette, Diamond's initial curiosity about the metal plate generated excitement that led to experimentation with sound and texture—expanding her scientific understanding of how body movement, momentum, and weight interact with metal to produce sound. Diamond tested cause and effect with a calculated jump on top of the metal plate, refined the production of sound, and explored the relationship between her moving body and materials. Her enjoyment and curiosity quickly spread to become a communal endeavor. Diamond never explicitly invited her classmates into the activity, yet she turned the mundane metal insert in the ground into both a game and an experience of communal enactment of agency with her excitement, joy, and loud enticing sounds. The grunting. The stomping. The jumping. The yelling out of “oh yeah?”—a challenge call that ultimately welcomes peers to join—are all dynamic and creative expressions and embodiments of Black girlhood (Brown, 2019). Diamond's talent for turning idle time into a dynamic, collective endeavor of shared learning experience is one example of how young Black girls use their creativity, interests, and imagination to expand curiosity, scientific intelligence, and/or develop new skills (King & Pringle 2019; Madkins, 2021; Toliver, 2023). Diamond's teacher did not interrupt or punish the engagements nor Diamond's spontaneity and excitement to do “one more jump” while the rest of the class had returned inside, indicating she supports Diamond's agency.
We intentionally chose to start with an analysis of the joy and capabilities of young Black girls who, like many intersectionally minoritized groups in educational research, are too often hyper-visible in deficit theorizing (Chilisa et al., 2017), narratives of criminalization (Morris, 2016), and underachievement (Evans-Winters, 2014) yet nearly invisible in the broader social conception of joyful learning (Morris, 2022), robust childhoods (Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and sophisticated knowledge-making (Adair & Colegrove, 2021). The purpose of this article is to expand the theorization of Black girlhoods as well as the literature that makes visible the often-muted brilliance and joy of Black girls.
In the remainder of this article, we examine our own positionalities, then review the literature addressing: the impact of a neoliberal context on Black children and teachers in early childhood; and that of intersectional oppressions, antiblackness, adultification, and discipline on Black girls’ schooling experiences. Black girlhood and Engaged Pedagogy are then proposed as liberatory theoretical frameworks to recognize, support, and theorize the agentic and community-oriented experiences of Black girls in urban educational spaces and to examine how educators respond to their capabilities. After describing our study and data sources, in our findings, we share 60 strategies we observed Black girls engaging in for community-building in the three PreK classrooms, offer and analyze two additional narratives of preschool Black girls building community and how they were responded to. We discuss the implications of our findings for urban education and the education of all Black girls and conclude that disrupting Black girls' epistemic erasures and criminalization requires foregrounding community, Black girls agency, identities, knowledges, and joy as emancipatory tools.
Positionality Statement
The voice that I now seek is both individual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the intersection of my unique biography with the larger meaning of my historical times. (Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Theory, p. vii)
In an effort to stave off “dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen”—that emerge when as researchers we do not carefully examine our own and others’ racialized and cultural systems of knowing and experiencing the world—throughout this work, we reflected on our own positions, roles, experiences, lenses, cultural, and racial identities embedded in the research process, our analysis, and its outcomes (Milner, 2007, p. 388).
I (Natacha) came to this work with lived experiences that have shaped my understanding and theorization of how Black girlhood is navigated, perceived, and defined in schools and society. This starting point is aligned with Black Feminist Theory (Collins, 2009) which centers and theorizes from the lives, knowledges, and experiences of Black women. As a Black woman who was once a Black girl, I situate and implicate myself within these narratives of Black girlhood, not just as an observer, researcher, and scholar, but as a daughter, mother, sister, descendant, student, and educator of Black girls whose knowledges I honor and some of which I embody. In the 11 years I spent as an early childhood and elementary educator in U.S. urban schools, I have taught and learned from many Black girls. I have experienced and witnessed the marginalization of Black girlhood, I have nurtured and been nurtured by many Black girls and women, and, at times, have myself participated in systems that reinscribe patriarchal, racist, hegemonic ideals of academic norms and success that cause harm to Black girls and other minoritized children. My positionality affords me a certain perspective on the schooling experiences and capabilities of Black girls but does not make me an expert on Black girlhood. An embedded argument of this piece is that Black girlhood is diverse, multifaceted, understudied, and deserves to be examined in all of its complexity and sophistication to disempower oppressive stereotypes and monolithic ideas of Black girls.
I (Jennifer) am a white woman who studies how racism and white supremacy impacts young children's schooling experiences. My own identities and schooling experiences differ from the young Black girls centered in our study. For that, I am committed to continuous and critical reflectivity on my connection to the historical, societal, systemic, and interpersonal harm caused by white supremacy and antiblackness and the deficit views they justify and perpetuate in our schooling systems. I went to public school in Sacramento, California where I learned to see the world as an unjust, racially problematic space. My research with young children centers, prioritizes, and learns with and from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars, co-researchers, children, and communities of color. I reject white-supremacist desires to ignore, control, and label young Black girls based on whether they adhere to restrictive standards of behavior, or narrow ideas of what schooling should be like for Black children.
Review of the Literature
Play, Agency, Community, and Knowledge-Making in a Neoliberal Early Childhood Context
Play is valuable in itself but can also provide children opportunities to develop sophisticated understandings of academic knowledge and concepts—through authentic, engaging, participative, and agentive ways. (Mariana Souto-Manning, 2017, p. 786)
Play is a powerful avenue for young children to engage in joyful, deep, and communal knowledge-making, especially when children are afforded the agency to follow their interests, and find relevance, enjoyment, and connections to the learning and their environment. Knowledge-making for young children does not result from passively receiving, memorizing, and regurgitating standardized knowledge (hooks, 2003; Freire, 2018) in hyper-controlled environments that leave little space, time, and trust for young children to observe, talk, contribute, wonder, inquire, test, fail, persist, construct their learning collaboratively, and impact their communities (Beneke et al., 2024; Jones et al., 2023; Yoon & Templeton, 2019). Regular opportunities to play and use their agency enable children to expand their capabilities (Adair, 2014). When young children can use their agency at school, they often choose to work collectively with others (Adair & Colegrove, 2021).
Being able to play, learn in agentive ways, and work with others collectively is routinely denied to young Black children in schools (Bryan, 2021; Wright, Counsell, & Tate, 2015). This is particularly problematic considering that many Black communities give priority to communal living and cooperative problem solving and these preferences affect educational motivation, aspiration, and task performance (Gay, 2002). Community refers to individuals who engage in communal activities, discussions, and sharing of knowledge for the betterment of all members. These communal learning experiences foster a sense of belonging and commitment to the group (Love, 2015). Social connectedness and collective solidarity have not only been essential to Black communities’ knowledge sharing and education but also to their survival and survivance (Dillard, 2012; Givens, 2021). In their investigation of Black children's attitudes toward education in urban and suburban schools, Sankofa and colleagues (2023) found that Black children resisted individualistic and competitive classrooms and preferred contexts supporting the expression of communalism and high verve.
Yet, in the U.S. neoliberal era of productivity agendas and hyper-individualism, concerns about young children's compliance, school readiness, and achievement measured by state and federally mandated assessments—have reinforced the ideals of an autonomous individual child perpetuated by euro-western child development theory (Pérez & Cannella, 2011; Taylor et al., 2012). Due to historical disparities in access to well-resourced, quality, culturally relevant educational opportunities, an education debt has accumulated for low-income communities of color (Ladson Billings, 2006). The education debt amplified by accountability policies continues to backfire on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx children who—with an achievement gap narrative—are assumed to be, positioned, and treated as deficient compared to their white peers (Au, 2016; Boutte, 2012). Denisha Jones (Jones & Hagopian, 2020) states: Test-based accountability increases the use of high-stakes standardized testing to punish students and teachers, which disproportionately affects Black students, who remain on the losing end of the manufactured achievement gap. Thus, neoliberal reforms entrenched in white supremacy and anti-Black oppression pose specific challenges to the education of Black children. (p. 205)
In his analysis of the achievement gap Discourse, Carey (2014) explains that educational stakeholders, far-removed from schools, have effectively misplaced blame on teachers, students, and schools for broader social and structural issues and reduced authentic and meaningful learning experiences, particularly for students of color in low-income urban schools. However, the achievement gap narrative is faulty because it neither captures the heterogeneity of Black children's capabilities and achievement (Iruka et al., 2017) nor does it account for the root causes of the achievement disparities.
In many other U.S. public urban early childhood contexts, Diamond would have been redirected to wait quietly in line, with her hands behind her back and a bubble in her mouth. Her exploration would be interpreted as disobedient, lacking self-control, and disruptive to her peers (Jenkins, 2021). Systems of education driven by the narrative of an achievement gap and school readiness are neither liberatory (Soto & Swadener, 2002) nor responsive to Black children developing empowered positive self-identities, skills, intellect, criticality, and joyful learning (Muhammad, 2023).
Standardization has also led to teacher deprofessionalization with educators having less agency to draw from their own experiences and expertise, and from the knowledge of their students and communities, to plan educational experiences—as they are mandated to follow prescribed curricula which perpetuate inequities (Dover, 2022; Milner, 2013). Policies aimed at remediating this constructed achievement gap in knowledge and ability have impacted how teachers engage with young children of color and turned educators into agents of surveillance tasked to discipline and perform interventions on children (Gregory et al., 2010). Nonetheless, addressing inequities in education requires a centering of Black girls’ experiences and knowledges (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016) as well as teachers’ voices as they respond to these structural injustices and deficit narratives (Ladson Billings, 2022; McKinney de Royston et al., 2021).
Intersectionality, Adultification, Biases, and Criminalization
That the term “colored girl” is almost a term of reproach in the social life of America is all too true; she is not known and hence not believed in; she belongs to race that is best designated by the term “problem,” and she lives beneath the shadow of that problem which envelopes and obscures her. (Fannie Barrier Williams,
Williams’ century-old depiction of “the colored girl” as unknown, invisibilized, discredited, and problematic, still rings true to contemporary societal views of Black girlhood. A long genealogy of Black women has theorized on how Black girls and women are subjugated to interlocking systems of racial and gendered oppressions in areas such as education (Collins, 2009). Crenshaw (1998) coined the term intersectionality to provide a framework of how gender, class, and race interact to subjugate and invisibilize Black women in unique ways. Intersectionality allows us to “analyz[e] sexist oppression in the particular and specific ways it is manifest in Black experience” (hooks, 1994, p. 69). For Black girls in their youth, the liminality of their age compounds to this matrix of sexist and racist domination and oppression (Winn, 2010) at times including dis/ability, language, gender expression, immigration status, geography, and/or religion. These overlapping identities simultaneously impact Black girls’ experiences in schools.
In early childhood schooling contexts, one-way antiblackness manifests is in an institutional unwillingness to see Black youth as children and leaving them out of conceptualizations of childhood (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Gilmore & Bettis, 2021). Black girls are often perceived as more mature and accountable for their actions, life circumstances, and situations—in and out of school. A nationwide survey revealed that compared to white girls of the same age, Black girls ages 5–14 are perceived to need less nurturing, protection, comforting, and support, and they are thought to be more independent, know more adult topics, and about sex (Epstein et al., 2017). This adultification dehumanizes, obscures, and erases Black girlhood by denying care and protection generally afforded to children and resulting in harsher punishments because they are believed to “know better” (Morris, 2022). For instance, in September 2019, 6-year-old Black girl Kaia Rolle was begging a school-resource officer, through her tears, for a “second chance” at her Orlando charter school, while her tiny wrists were zip-tied behind her back to be arrested for throwing a tantrum. 3
This adultification or gap in perception begins in Black girls’ preschool years and denies them the benefit of innocence and believability because they are viewed as more resilient than their non-Black female peers (Crenshaw et al., 2015; Goff et al., 2014). These patterns of marginalization are reflected in data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights in which Black girls represent 20% of female preschool enrollment, yet 54% of girls are suspended from preschool (Office for Civil Rights, 2016).
Internalized gendered and racialized biases coupled with societal norms of desirable behaviors impede educators’ abilities to understand, appreciate, and nurture the diverse characteristics and capabilities young Black girls demonstrate and embody (Hines-Datiri & Carter Andrews, 2020; Madkins, 2021). These biases determine whether Black girls will be afforded active learning experiences that support agentic knowledge-making and positive self-identity development (Mims & Williams, 2020; Williams et al., 2020). While the ways Diamond engaged with her peers and environment engendered curiosity, expanded her capabilities, and co-created a joyful communal moment, the way educators interpret, penalize, or support these types of engagements can vary based on the intersecting gender, racial, and socio-economic identities of those performing them (Gilliam et al., 2016; Morris & Perry, 2017).
Zimmerman's (2018) secondary analysis of national data on Kindergarteners suggests that Black girls face a penalty as teachers’ perceptions of their behavior are simultaneously racialized and gendered to judge them more harshly than all non-Black girl groups. In her study of teachers’ perception of eighth-grade female students, Francis (2012) found that teachers view Black girls as more disruptive and disobedient than girls from other racio-ethnic backgrounds because teachers evaluate their behavior through the lens of the dominant school culture of individualism and competitiveness that does not value common Black cultural traits such as communal problem solving. Similarly, Morris’ (2007) ethnographic study of young Black girls’ discipline patterns in a public middle school, reveals that even when Black girls performed well academically and exhibited behaviors generally thought to lead to educational success, teachers still labeled them as loud, rude, and ghetto, and disciplined them for not exhibiting so-called “ladylike” behaviors. Black girls whose behaviors are often evaluated against a framework of white femininity—incongruent with enactments and experiences of femininity of girls of color from different class backgrounds and girls living in urban areas—are subjectively labeled as antagonistic, aggressive, disobedient and defiant, and suffer exclusionary discipline outcomes (Annamma et al., 2019). These biased views that interpret behaviors inequitably and unfairly often translate into lower academic expectations, harsher punishments, and eventually, juvenile justice involvement (Morris, 2016). Black girls’ strengths and capabilities are suffocated by what Monique Morris (2022) calls compulsive policing, and criminalization that stifles their learning and thriving at school.
Black girls should not have to resist or overcome limiting metanarratives that obscure their humanity and childhood to participate in agentive and joyful ways with others in school.
The Gap in Research
There is a need for scholarly endeavors that not only serve to empirically validate the experiences of girls of African descent, but also make use of such findings to […]transform pedagogical practices in classrooms; and actively promote social and educational policies at the micro- and macro-level, with those in mind who exist at the intersections of race, class, and gender. (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010, p. 15)
To fully understand and ameliorate the experiences of Black girls in schools, we need to disrupt dominant discourses of Black girls as “problems” to viewing them as competent agents in their lives (Graham, 2007). Much needed research attention has been given to the constructions and experiences of Black boyhood (e.g., Bryan, 2021; Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and much more is needed to reimagine schools as sites for care, empowerment, and wellness for all children. Black girls’ experiences and marginalization also deserve particular attention and documentation to transform existing practices that marginalize them.
Scholars have written in the field of early childhood education about how young children of color cultivate cultural pride and capabilities from their families and communities, in preparation for bias in school and society (e.g., Anderson et al., 2015). Child development has started to illuminate how racism impacts children's development and knowledge-making in US early schooling and care (e.g., Curenton et al., 2022). Iruka and Hawkins (2022) disaggregated national quantitative data by race and gender with an intersectional lens to make visible how multiple systems influence and impact young Black girls’ development, learning, schooling, and life success.
A growing body of research confirms that Black girls are uniquely marginalized in schools, illuminating their schooling experiences and needs. Most focus on adolescent girls and few empirical studies qualitatively document and analyze Black girls’ capabilities. There is a need for more asset-based research that centers on the capabilities and experiences of all Black girls. This study seeks to make visible and empirically validate Black girls’ capacities and capabilities and illuminate the harmful practices and policies that limit them in early childhood.
Theoretical Frameworks: Making Black Girlhood Visible
Theorizing Black Girlhood
As an organizing construct, Black girlhood makes possible the affirmation of Black girls’ lives and, if necessary, their liberation. (Ruth Nicole Brown, 2013, p. 1)
The scarcity of Black girls’ voices and experiences in education research has previously led scholars to rely on Black feminist frameworks to examine Black girlhood- now calling for new theoretical conceptualizations specific to Black girls’ experiences, cultural productions, and intersecting identities in early childhood to teenage years (e.g., Brown, 2013; Halliday, 2019; Smith, 2019). Failing to consider the particularities of how age intersects with race, gender, and class when learning with and from Black girls further threatens to adultify them by conflating their perspectives, expressions, and experiences to those of adult Black women. Theorizing Black girlhood requires we ask different questions out of research, notice and become attuned to the worlds Black girls create, write to the depths and breadth of their expressions, and articulate Black girlhood as dynamic, fluid, and creative (Brown, 2019; Cox, 2015). Brown (2013) articulates and theorizes the cultural production of Black girls in a space she envisioned called “Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths” (SOLHOT)—a theoretical framework that affirms Black girls’ lives, expressions, and cultural productions—from the smack of their lips to their critical thoughts, dreams, goals, initiatives, uses of their voice, art, dance, and spirit toward the collective benefit of Black girls everywhere. 4
Similarly, our analysis of preschool Black girls foregrounds the celebration of Black girlhood in all its forms, expressions, and complexity—paying close attention to agentic, playful, collective, and creative engagements initiated and enacted by Black girls. This lens allows us to pose research questions particular to Black girls’ expressions and experiences in urban schools and center Black girls’ ways of being and knowing—even if they are misunderstood or incongruent with the needs of the educational systems tasked to educate them. Ultimately, a Black girlhood framework reclaims their full humanity and celebrates diverse expressions, and relationships that produce feelings of belonging and community (Brown, 2013). Critical work with and about Black girlhood requires (a) a recognition of their unique intersectional identities and how they impact their experiences; (b) love and care for Black girls; (c) a desire to empower, support, and elevate Black girls, their narratives and various forms of expressions; (d) a focus on Black girls’ meaning-making, agency, joy, and resilience in the midst of harm experienced in schools and society.
Because this study examines the capabilities of Black girls along with the responses from their context, we also used an Engaged Pedagogy lens to analyze how their collective actions were responded to.
Engaged Pedagogy: Joy, Community Engagements and Liberatory Knowledge-Making
bell hooks’ theorizing of Engaged Pedagogy (1994) challenges hierarchical schooling structures and dynamics rooted in white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalistic values. Racism and sexism, she states, are firmly embedded within our psyches and schooling to inform: (a) how educators teach and interact with students; (b) whose ideas are taken up and whose are disregarded; and (c) what values and habits-of-being are most reflected in classrooms. This includes the “banking system” of education (Freire, 2018) that conceptualizes learning as students passively consuming, memorizing, and storing “compartmentalized bits of knowledge” fed by a teacher (hooks, 1994, p. 15). Instead, hooks posits students should be active, reflective, and critical participants in their knowledge-making and teachers should seek to create participatory spaces for knowledge-sharing and student empowerment. All should be engaged and accountable for molding classroom communities that reflect their identities, complex lives, and experiences. The following guiding principles from hook's Engaged Pedagogy are most relevant to our study of preschool Black girls in building classroom community (hooks, 1994):
Co-constructing learning: generating interest in one another, hearing one-another's voices, recognizing one another's presence, normalizing differences and multiculturalism. Generating excitement through collective effort: joy and passion stimulate communal engagement and should be nurtured. Joy and excitement co-exist and even stimulate serious intellectual and academic engagement. Having flexible schedules and agendas that allow for students’ spontaneity.
Methodology
Learning From Preschool-Age Black Girls in Two Studies
The secondary analysis detailed in this article draws from data originally collected in two large multisited studies that employed comparative video-cued ethnographic methods (see Tobin, Hsueh, & Karasawa, 2009; Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989). The Agency and Young Children Study took place across urban, border, and suburban Texas. Findings documented rich and sophisticated engagements, skills and capabilities young Latinx and Black children demonstrated when they could use their agency regularly in their learning contexts. The Civic Action and Young Children Study focused on racialized communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States to look beyond the narrow vision of civic education as the acquisition of patriotic knowledge. Findings revealed when the young children in the study used their individual and collective agency to act on behalf of/with other people in their everyday early childhood settings, they were indeed engaging in civic action.
For this analysis, we focused on one classroom from Agency and Young Children and two from Civic Action and Young Children that served Black girls. We asked: (a) How do preschool Black girls use their agency to enact various community-building capabilities in their early childhood environments? (b) How do teachers interpret and respond to young Black girls’ actions in different preschool settings? Next, we detail each site and then detail original data collection protocols and timelines.
Three Classroom Sites Serving Black Girls
Our analysis of Black girls’ capabilities centered on three Texas preschool classrooms serving children ages three to five. The girls in our study were four and five-years old. In Texas, 12.9% of the state's population identifies as African American or Black (U.S. Census, 2019) and 12.6% of students in preK-12 public schools are Black. All three of our sites exceeded this average.
The following descriptions are informed by Black girlhood and Engaged Pedagogy frameworks.
Cielo: Brittany, Diamond, Angelica, Kamille, and Alycia
Five of the 11 girls in our analysis came from the Cielo classroom: Brittany, Diamond, Angelica, Kamille, and Alycia. They shared a classroom with 12 Latinx and Tejanx students. Brittany loved to dance, often shaking her braid beads to the tune of class songs. She talked slowly and deliberately and often enjoyed working or reading with peers rather than alone. She liked to celebrate her achievements out loud which enticed her peers to notice and try it themselves, and she engaged peers and adults easily, even questioning the researchers’ presence and intentions in her classroom. Diamond was observant and attentive to her classmates and teachers. She seemed to enjoy taking charge and helping classmates who were struggling, so much so that Diamond's teachers often called her the “third teacher.” Even when her classmates pushed back against her innate leadership desires and commanding tone, she had the ability to mend and draw them back into activities through humor, challenges, songs, and minor subversive breaking of the rules such as blowing bubbles in her milk with two straws, which make those around her squeal. Angelica was confident in her own skills and abilities and vocally supported people when they struggled, such as exclaiming, “she did her best!” when someone made a mistake. She volunteered quickly and often helped solve arguments between other children. Kamille had a controlled and studious demeanor with her teachers but a playful adventurous approach with her peers. She easily facilitated solutions to communal problems such as when fruit ran out at her breakfast table, and she instructed each table mate to put the fruit back in the bowl so that a peer could have some. Kamille tried to enforce egalitarianism that ran contrary to Diamond's leadership approaches. Alycia was the youngest in the class, having arrived in the classroom mid-semester. She was quiet and observant. She readily accepted guidance and help with classroom activities and many of the children checked on her throughout the day.
Cabritas: Zanaya, Makalynn, Jackie, and Christel
Zanaya, Makalynn, Jackie, and Christel shared a classroom with one Black boy and 14 Latinx and Tejanx students. Zanaya was studious and a diligent rule follower. Her teacher often asked her to hold teaching props and model things for others. Zanaya consulted with her teachers often when peers in the class hurt her feelings. Makalynn knew where everything belonged in the classroom. She meticulously cleaned and put away materials for the class and helped other children find their name cards because she was an early reader. Makalynn often wanted to play the mom during imaginary play and directed the rules of the game. Jackie regularly chose playing with her friends over following rules in the classroom. She was denied recess often in her classroom because she would make up games and engage lots of children in them. She was observant and often initiated help for those who needed it or invited everyone to join in her activities. Christel was a petite, bubbly student who often shared laughs with peers and loved boots and pink. While she worked hard to please her teachers, she sometimes got in trouble for wanting to talk, and be with others instead of working independently or for turning mundane tasks into play—such as when before naptime, she created a challenge to make blankets fly the highest. She was relatively fearless and helped classmates get over their fear of bugs and dirt.
Collab Nursery School: Abigail and Alexis
Alexis and Abigail, two biracial Black girls, shared a classroom with one Asian and 10 Caucasian students. Alexis was soft-spoken and loved to snuggle with a close friend while listening to a book. She enjoyed building structures, and pretending to be a cat or be the baby of the family. She often expressed to her peers when she needed help. Working with peers empowered her to try hard things and take risks. Abigail loved to tell detailed stories to peers and adults and liked to bring books from home to share with her class. When drawing or building, she narrated her actions which attracted her peers’ attention to what she was doing. She was assertive and loved to play a teenager in the home living center (Table 1).
Schools and Participants.
Original Data Collection
Both studies that included the three classrooms detailed above were led by Jennifer and employed a variation of video-cued multivocal ethnography (VCE). Data collection consisted of one year of traditional participant observation and ethnographic documentation of children's agency through field notes, artifact collection, photographs, and full-day filming. Both studies also included creating a 20-minute film reflecting typical everyday classroom life and showing the film as a cue for focused interviews with over 400 children, teachers, parents, and administrators across school sites and communities
In the original data collection, the research team included Latinx immigrants, Hispanic, Asian immigrants, and White American scholars all of whom were bilingual or multilingual. When Natacha joined the research team as a graduate student, she asked specifically about the Black girls in the data. Our watching of the films was careful in a way that reflected the tension between noticing the girls’ capabilities and being aware of the white supremacist interpretations that often follow Black girls’ capabilities in school settings. This led to the secondary analysis focusing solely on the Black girls in the data.
Secondary Analysis
For our analysis of Black girls’ community-building capabilities, we isolated 45 hr of video footage from Cabritas, Collab, and Cielo. First, we independently watched and logged all the video footage from each site. We took extensive field notes on the video classroom footage at a general descriptive level—locating and coding each scene in which Black girls were present. We narratively described each scene, transcribing dialogue and carefully documenting nonverbal behavior. We also noted the role of the environment in each scene in terms of how the context impacted what the girls could do or not do. Then, we narrowed the scenes to focus on those in which Black girls participated in a shared endeavor of some kind, defined as a collective act between two or more children. During this phase, we noticed that many of the scenes of interest involved young Black girls turning individual endeavors into communal ones. For example, at the Collab preschool, while each child was engaged in self-selected independent play, Abigail started narrating out loud what she was drawing on a piece of paper. As Abigail's story was developing involving family members and imaginary elements, children started gathering around her, watching, listening, adding elements to her story, and asking her questions about it until the drawing and storytelling became a communal activity.
Next, we organized the scenes we identified into a tabled list by the types of activities the Black girls initiated, contributed to, or cultivated with others. In each scene isolated for this analysis, we marked and documented each capability they demonstrated. We developed codes for the strategies preschool Black girls used or embodied that transformed an individual endeavor into a communal one. We included all scenes in which Black girls spontaneously engaged at least one classmate or adult without an adult's direction.
Findings
Black Girls’ Community-Building Capabilities
Across the data, we found that the Black girls in all three classrooms were skilled at turning individual endeavors into shared communal ones and we documented 60 strategies they embodied and/or demonstrated (Table 2).
Sixty Strategies to Engage Others in Communal Play/Learning Demonstrated by 11 Black Preschool Girls.
Capabilities as Strengths
Some capabilities made it possible for Black girls to create excitement around intellectual or academic activities. These capabilities included asking peers to join an activity verbally or in embodied ways such as calling attention to something of interest, moving their body over, waving others over as an invitation to join them, reaching out materials towards others, giving up a seat to make room for others. For instance, during recess, Enrique found a bug and laid it on the bench next to him in the playhouse. Kamille bent down to look over his shoulder. When she noticed he was about to leave with the bug in hand, she asked him if he could lay the bug on the table in the playhouse so they could both examine it. He did and sat across from Kamille for several minutes to observe as they exchanged thoughts and ideas and created a protective barrier with their hands around the bug. Other times, a child would start off individually looking at a book or painting and then start calling out to others telling them a story about what they were doing, and this prompted others to share similar stories or build on the original one. Other times, these capabilities included offering help or noticing a need and going over to help. Sometimes, turning an individual activity into a shared one was done by verbally disagreeing with someone overheard by one of the girls. Debating and arguing created collective problem-solving. The strategies embodied and demonstrated varied, were multiple and dependent on the girls contexts, personalities, relationships, and subjectivities.
Turning an individual activity into a communal one engendered joy, curiosity, and sustained attention not just for the Black girls but for all of the students who joined in. Their collective participation led to a different type of engagement. Joining efforts with others, receiving help, and engaging with others had class community members participate and contribute in an endeavor they otherwise would not have engaged. These activities resulted in smiling, squeals, excited yells, laughter, dancing, making silly faces, and wide-eyed surprise, all of which, we believe, signal joy. The joy sustained their attention for longer-than-normal periods of time as they were driven by curiosity or their own intrinsic motivation to work on or refine skills collectively. The agency and joy generated in this collectivity moved away from control and punishment to get children to engage in learning. Valuing joy and community-building is a humanizing approach to education that centers children's ideas, curiosity, voices, and ways of knowing (hooks, 1994; Muhammad, 2023). Black joy is an important element of liberatory education as it focuses on love and well-being even as the girls in our study must navigate antiblackness, sexism, and other intersectional oppression in schools (Love, 2019).
Context Matters for the Demonstration of Community-Building Capabilities
In addition to the 60 community-building strategies the Black girls used to turn individual activities into shared ones, we also found that community-building capabilities were not supported equally in all three educational contexts. Context played a significant role in whether capabilities were expanded, dismissed, or even punished. The girls’ actions and their demonstrated skills above were, at times, supported and normalized by teachers. In other settings, the same actions were prevented, stopped, or disciplined. To show the difference context makes in supporting Black girls’ capabilities and joy, we offer two more examples from our study involving Alexis, Christel, and Zanaya who used their skills to create and sustain communal activities with different results. In the first example, Alexis turns an individualistic letter-writing task into a shared endeavor that is eventually prioritized over a planned classroom activity. In the second example, Christel and Zanaya attempt to read together and grow a group of active readers with others in the class with discouraging results.
Example #2: Alexis Creates a Shared Writing Endeavor
One morning during play time at the Collab preschool, Ms. Nancy was showing a group of four students the materials available in the writing corner—including stencils, stamps, various types of paper, writing, and drawing tools. Alexis, a four-year-old Black girl with a crown of black coily hair and striped coral pajamas (it was pajama day) softly stated “I don’t really know how to do an S”—the last letter in her name. Ms. Nancy responded this was a great spot to practice. Alexis repeated: “I’m not very good at Ss!” Ms. Nancy repeated herself too and showed Alexis the materials again. A third time, Alexis declared, “I don’t even know how to do an S.” Ms. Nancy turned to the rest of the children and announced that there were letter stamps and encouraged them to write a letter. Alexis, Caroline, Robbie, and Lena immediately huddled around the writing table, each choosing their own individual paper and writing materials as they had been encouraged to do by their teacher. Caroline grabbed the letter stamp X, pressed it firmly on the ink pad then onto a green piece of paper. Lena—a young white girl with a short blond bob and animal—print pajamas chose purple paper and a pencil, and then sat down at her own table near Caroline (Figure 2).
Alexis (perched on the table), Caroline, Robbie, and Lena practicing the letter S in the writing corner.
Alexis looked intently for an S in the alphabet stamp set, leaning half of her body on the writing table. She found it and exclaimed “An S!” Caroline smiled. Alexis picked up the S stamp, pressed it to the ink pad, and firmly stamped it on the green paper Caroline was using. Alexis positioned herself comfortably on top of the table to get better access to the paper. Caroline encouraged Alexis as she traced the S carefully. Robbie, a young white girl with curly red hair and a robe, got curious and came over to watch. Lena worked on her own piece of purple paper but began inching closer as she watched what they were doing with the S. Caroline and Alexis continued taking turns using the pencil and tracing Ss on the paper they now shared while Robbie and Lena observed. As this unfolded, Ms. Nancy and the parent helper, Ms. Laura debated whether to make Alexis, Caroline, Robbie, and Lena leave their letter-writing activity to make the silly putty they were scheduled to make with Ms. Laura. “Do you want me to take them away from there?” Ms. Laura asked. “They’re engulfed.” Ms. Nancy replied laughing. “Let's wait!”
Capability Expansion from Alexis's Community-Oriented Learning
Alexis expressing a need repeatedly to the group changed the course of how children engaged with the center and what they focused their writing attention on. Practicing the S eventually became a shared goal because Alexis desired to get better at making one. Alexis used her body positioning and the materials to transcend individualism. At first, she stood next to Caroline and then started using the same stamp pad, and then the same paper. Alexis eventually perched on the table next to Caroline along with the stamps and the green paper they ended up sharing. Alexis and Caroline seamlessly passed a pencil back and forth, even though there were many materials they could have used on their own. All four girls became active participants in learning how to draw an “S.” Even Robbie who stood closely to Alexis and Caroline seemingly not doing anything engaged in what Barbara Rogoff (2014) refers to as “learning by observing and pitching in” as she was attentive and motivated to learn with Alexis and Caroline, informally participating and learning through focused observation. Lena kept looking back and listening in to Alexis and Caroline while working on her own letter practice.
Community-building capabilities are hard to observe because children's individual academic skills, as determined by their grade level curriculum, often occupy educators’ documentation and observation efforts with young children. Yet, from an Engaged Pedagogy perspective, being able to catalyze collective endeavors and sustain community is critical (hooks, 1994). Alexis established a seamless, fluid way to engage with her peers and materials through embodied ways after expressing her needs and goals (Brown, 2019). She creatively positioned her body on the table to spontaneously share stamps, paper, and pencil with Caroline in a way that set a new collective goal that Caroline, Robbie, and Lena willingly opted into. This ability for students to “hear each other, listen to one another” is what bell hooks named as an “exercise in recognition” (1994, p. 41) essential to Engaged Pedagogy and building community. When Alexis ended up sitting on top of the table counter hovering over the paper, the activity shifted from parallel play to communal engagement for the benefit of all. Alexis's efforts generated curiosity, joy, and excitement (hooks, 1994) and reinforced the ethic of caring (Love, 2019) in the classroom. A school readiness lens would position Alexis as underperforming because she is not yet able to write all the letters in her first name. Instead, we can notice and articulate with a Black girlhood lens the complex ways in which Alexis facilitates her own knowledge-making in ways that honor multiple oral and embodied expressions,are agentic, communal, empowering, and joyful (Smith, 2019). Ms. Nancy did not set a communal expectation for the children but recognized their engagement and chose to be flexible with the timeline of the next activity she had planned.
Still, as the next example will show, efforts to create shared activities through the demonstration of community-building capabilities, are not a given even if young children have the capacity and motivation.
Example #3: Christel and Zanaya Create a Shared Reading Endeavor
During individual reading time at Cabritas, Christel-a petite Black girl with a pink jacket picked a book, Christel: “Aaah, Zanaya come look at this!” Zanaya scrunched up her face and frowned, “Ewe!!!!!” Christel: [ Zanaya: Ewe!!! Christel: Ewe ewe ewe! Christel slid the underwear book back to her spot on the carpet diagonally opposite from Zanaya. Zanaya flipped the page in her own book and started counting each character with her finger. Christel slid over again to the square Zanaya would not move from. Christel: Zanaya, come and look at these squirrels. Look at these animals! Come look at these animals! Zanaya: They’ve got a poky thing. They’re stinky. Christel: [ Zanaya: Ewe stinky. Hold your nose! Christel: [smelling the book] He's not stinky! He's not. Smell him. Smell him!
Zanaya rubbed two fingers on the animal in the book and then smelled her fingers. Christel smiled a big smile. “He does smell!” Christel and Zanaya laughed and mirrored each other's disgusted faces while naming the “stinky” animals they saw in the book. Evania, a Latina girl nearby, moved towards them. Soon they were all kneeling on the rug over the book, flipping through pages with delight and laughing (Civic Action Video, 6 November 2018) (Figure 3).
Christel, Evania, and Zanaya engaging with the “stinky” book.
Capability Expansion from Christel's and Zanaya's Community-Oriented Learning
Christel and Zanaya demonstrated a strong range of academic skills during this short time. They engaged in reading, as well as shared creative interpretations of the pictures. They used the pictures as context clues. They handled the book by turning pages, reading left to right, linking words to illustrations, and sharing ideas related to the content of the book. They also demonstrated community-building capabilities by sharing materials and participating to sustain interest in the book's content. They crossed physical and individualistic boundaries created on the floor of the reading area. They used their voices to carry over and through the imposed isolation of individual reading time. They also catalyzed interest in Evania.
A Black girlhood lens helps us be attuned to the worlds Christel and Zanaya created through their expressions here with imaginary smells, mock disgust, smiles, and giggles to engage with the book and each other (Brown, 2019). Christel and Zanaya engaged with the book in a way that incited joy and developed cooperative relationships to counter the “boredom, uninterest and apathy” that arises when learning is mechanical, individualized, and disconnected from self (hooks, 1994, p. 10). In moving away from her assigned carpet square to engage in a humorous and stimulating exchange with her friend, Christel used her agency to transgress the classroom rule of reading independently and quietly in a preassigned spot. She found joy in learning while still engaging with the book in a way that was meaningful and intellectually stimulating to her (hooks, 1994). The engagement Christel and Zanaya sought during this reading time could be seen as resistance to the isolation mandated by classroom rules that limited their ability to build relationships with one another, connect through the use of dialogue, make meaning, and acquire knowledge collectively (Collins, 2009). While bell hooks (1994) identifies excitement and spontaneity as essential to the learning process, many contexts label community-building capabilities as disruptive. This is best illustrated in what happens next to Christel, Zanaya, and Evania.
Christel, Zanaya, and Evania Are Disciplined
After a few minutes of collectively naming and smelling the characters on the pages of the book, Ms. Camille approached the three students and hovered over them with her hands on her hips. “Where is your book?” The girls immediately stopped laughing and looked up at her. “Go get your book,'” she directs Evania. “Christel” she exclaims, “Go to your spot!” Just then, Ms. Camille noticed a student sitting alone, reading independently, not engaging with the three girls. She praises this student. “Thank you, Alyssa, for sitting in your spot.” Ms. Camille then sat by Christel who was now in her assigned square. Christel pointed at and said smiling at Ms. Camille, “Look at all the animals!” Ms. Camille pointed to various illustrations, named the animals, and asked some “what is that?” questions. Ms. Camille: [ Christel: a pond Ms. Camille Ms. Camille: What is that? Ms. Camille Christel: Ms. Camille
Ms. Camille interrupted Christel and Zanaya's communal engagement, scolded them, and sent them back to their assigned seats to read independently and quietly. She engaged them as individuals, taking control of the activity. Christel was no longer in control of her learning and had to engage with the content individually or be taught by an adult. By interrupting this exchange and separating the girls, Ms. Camille “enact[ed] rituals of control that [were] about domination and the unjust exercise of power” (hooks, 1994, p. 5). She interrupts the shared joy and excitement that contributes to the community culture essential for the classroom to be “an exciting place, never boring” (hooks, 1994, p. 7). The girls were positioned as passive consumers of knowledge. The rigid, inflexible schedule and rules that governed the classroom did not allow for spontaneity or collective work.
Instead of praising or criticizing either Ms. Nancy or Ms. Camille, we want to specify that this article is not about any singular teacher. If there is any comparison to make about individual teachers, it is that Ms. Camille had very little agency and Ms. Nancy could use her agency to determine curriculum and pedagogical decisions. While it could be convenient or easy to bemoan Ms. Camille as a professional or simply argue that teachers must change, we do not see Ms. Camille as a problematic individual but rather as a reluctant participant in a system that justifies institutional control over young Black girls’ collective knowledge creation (Brown, 2019). The young girls’ ingenuity was seen as an infraction according to the larger institution of which Ms. Camille is also governed. Her determination to individualize, separate, and de-sophisticate the girls’ engagement with content reflects larger societal patterns of being uncomfortable with Black girls using their voices, creating community, and turning individualistic endeavors into ones that are joyful and communal.
Discussion
Our findings reveal that having the ability to initiate communal activities empowered young Black girls to have ownership of their learning and experience joy. Diamond expanded scientific knowledge through her embodied curiosity and joyful engagement. Alexis sought peer engagement to help develop her writing capabilities. Christel and Zanaya engaged with literacy together with humor making reading a positive and joyful endeavor. Black girls embodied skills and expertise, including community-building, that if legitimated in educational contexts can reconceptualize schools as sites to empower Black girls and other minoritized children. Community-building is about becoming and liberation for children with marginalized intersecting identities (Morris, 2019) because when children are able to co-construct their community, contribute their ways of being and ideas, they develop a sense of belonging, bring their whole selves to a classroom community that they shape and are shaped by. Yet, the quotidian interactive, physical, intellectual endeavors we witnessed young Black girls create across classroom contexts are too often disciplined, labeled as misbehavior, or framed as impediments. Positioning Black girls as competent agents of their lives who navigate and influence their contexts is of particular significance given that their abilities, personhood, and humanity are often devalued or ignored in educational settings and society. These harmful mislabelings deny Black girls the ability to develop capabilities and fully experience robust childhoods.
It's essential to understand Black girls’ ways of being, ways of knowing, and their first practices so that they can be fully honored in school spaces (Love et al., 2021). To interrupt cycles of surveillance, punishment, and adultification, researchers and practitioners must direct attention to learn from and normalize multiple embodiments of Black girlhood, not just their genius but also Black girls ordinary (Shange, 2019)—even if they differ from previous articulations centered on white middle-class norms of femininity (Brown, 2013). Black girlhood frameworks enabled us to value, document, and name their capabilities but also their mundane engagments—an important step toward their liberation (Brown, 2019). An Engaged Pedagogy framework reveals how knowledge-making and community-building are rooted in children's life experiences, personal expressions, ideas, and curiosities. To be sure, young Black girls’ capabilities are neither universal nor a prerequisite to supporting their joy and well-being. The only way to center children's personal expressions, skills, and capabilities is to allow them space to express, demonstrate, and refine them.
Disrupting community-building endeavors not only interrupts developing reading, and STEM skills but also impacts the joy of learning, community, criticality, school engagement, and academic achievement (Leticia et al., 2014; Muhammad, 2020). If we continue to ignore and/or punish the contributions of Black girls, the gap in schooling experiences will only widen the gap in achievement. Black girls will continue to be routinely disciplined into taking up less space for the purpose of controlling their bodies, to make them compliant and efficient enough to do well on standardized measures (Brown, 2009; Price-Dennis et al. 2017). While Black girls are resilient and capable of overcoming adversity with often unrecognizable tools and resources such as humor, wisdom, sharp tongues, and verve (Brown, 2013; Evans-Winters, 2005) they should not have to resist, subvert, or shrink themselves to abide by arbitrary standards of behavior or overcome racialized-gendered biases to participate in agentive and joyful knowledge-making.
Conclusion
Our analysis recognized children's experiences with joy as essential emancipatory avenues for learning, building connections, and community (Love, 2019). In centering young Black girls, we seek to “unlearn dominator models of education” (hooks, 2003, p. 48) and transform unjust power relations in early childhood educational research (Nxumalo, 2021). This study sought to make visible joyful Black girlhoods and interrupt dominant discourses of Black girls as problems. In our study, Black girls’ capabilities to engage, co-create, and build community were contingent on whether the context supported such engagements and recognized them as tools to expand knowledge and belonging. When their attempts to build community are misread as defiance, misbehavior, or disrespect, they must face additional obstacles to show and develop their full range of capabilities. Black girls deserve learning contexts in which their experiences, talents, joy, abilities, and identities are valued, protected, and nurtured.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iD
