Leveraging Black Children’s Sociopolitical Understandings in Justice-Oriented Elementary Teaching

To attend to the disjunctures between critical civic pedagogies as theorized and the everyday sociopolitical meaning making of Black children, Davis will conduct a social design experiment that invites teachers to participate in individual and group explorations of practice alongside analyses of Black children’s sociopolitical ideas. Information sources will come from prior research with 4th/5th graders that broached timely topics of the presidential election, anti-Black police brutality and the public health crisis in Flint, MI. Given the historical, cyclical nature of these ideas and relevance to the present, the first goal is to understand how educators are conceptualizing and navigating these recurrent dynamics in their work with Black children. The next phase of the project will investigate if/how close analyses of Black children’s ideas carry potential in shaping teachers’ pedagogical philosophies and imagination. The following questions will be answered from existing data and new data from pre-post interviews and group dialogue:

1. How do elementary teachers committed to justice-oriented pedagogy make meaning of the political and ethical dimensions of their professional practice relative to the current educational/sociopolitical climate? 
   1. If/how do conceptions of (Black) childhood emerge in relation to these understandings?
2. Does close engagement with Black children’s sociopolitical ideas shape pedagogical imagination and learning? What is the nature of these shifts in teachers’ understandings and practice?