Experiences Of Black Students Research Articles

Negotiating University, Fulfilling the Dream: The Case of Black Students

The experiences of Black students in Canadian higher education shed light on the societal and institutional challenges that influence their social and economic aspirations. In today’s societal and economic context, obtaining a postsecondary education degree is not just preferred but essential for securing the employment opportunities that most young people desire. For Black communities in particular, a university degree is often seen as the primary pathway to upward social mobility. However, Black students’ journeys toward higher education are frequently hindered by systemic barriers and institutional challenges. While there is extensive literature detailing the systemic forces that obstruct access to higher education for Black Canadians, there is limited academic focus on how these forces continue to affect Black students once they enter higher education. This article addresses this gap by investigating the educational experiences of Black students in Canadian universities, emphasizing the challenges posed by systemic racism and institutional barriers. Utilizing data from interviews and focus groups with Black undergraduate and graduate students from a university in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the study explores how historical and contemporary issues of anti-Black racism shape their academic journeys. It discusses the broader implications of these experiences and highlights the need for comprehensive institutional reforms to create genuinely inclusive and equitable educational environments. By centering the voices of Black students, this research aims to contribute to the ongoing dialog on racial equity in higher education.

Cultivating STEM engagement among African American youth: an exploration of secondary students’ voices

In the United States, individuals who identify as Black are severely underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This underrepresentation begins as early as middle school due to the stereotype of successful STEM students being white and male thus affecting Black students sense of belonging in STEM. The goal for this exploratory qualitative study was to understand the experiences of Black students in their science classes. Our choice of focus groups empowered these students, who have historically been missing from educational policy decisions, by providing them an opportunity to be part of the change they want to see in their schools. The results indicate that participants could see potential relevance in science and math classes but the structure of their current science classes (e.g., neglect and lack of care from teachers) affects their ability to actually experience this relevance. Despite this, many of our participants understood their value and believed that they “deserve more,” which shows that we can improve the experiences for Black students in STEM and increase their representation in these disciplines.

A PSA I’m here too: Exploring the Harmful Experiences of Black Students through Critical Narratives

The paper illustrates the digital narratives of 219 Black students within the K-12 educational setting of a large West coast state in the United States. The researchers employed the method of storytelling to analyze Instagram posts created by students, which aimed to shed light on the various forms of injustice experienced by Black students. These online contributions effectively revitalized the significance of Black students' narratives and encounters with racism. The authors posit that educational institutions should reconsider their approach to mitigating the negative consequences encountered by Black students within educational environments. The present study serves as a call to action for educators and stakeholders to confront systemic anti-Blackness and create inclusive educational environments that prioritize the well-being and success of all students. Through collective effort and a commitment to antiracist practices, we can work towards a more equitable and just educational system. Addressing objectification and Whiteness requires a comprehensive approach that surpasses individual actions. Educators must acknowledge the ramifications of racially insensitive behavior and its impact on Black students in K-12 environments.

We See You: A Co-Constructed Autoethnography of Black Women Educators Subverting Carcerality in Community with Black Students

This study examines the school experiences of Black students and the perceived impact that we (the researchers) as Black women educators have had on these experiences. We conducted a series of focus groups with thirty-four former and current students, all of whom identify as Black. Our questions centered around various aspects of the students’ high school experiences, specifically as they related to their reflections on their relationships with Black teachers compared to the school community at large. We found that overall, students reported having positive experiences with us as Black women and often felt humanized in our classes. These findings suggest that Black women educators like us, who use their pedagogy (influenced by their positionality) to subvert carceral and antiblack school policy and culture, employ what we have conceptualized as the Core Tenets of Spiritual Nourishment: (1) a sense of belonging, (2) visibility, (3) room to make mistakes, (4) representation, (5) support navigating the pressures of systemic racism and Black fatigue, (6) safe spaces to unpack traumas and (7) love perceived.

Affirmations of Black Being: Explicating the Potentialities of Self-Love in Higher Education

ABSTRACT Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students’ sense of self-love. In this paper, we utilize critical frameworks to examine how seven Black students conceptualize self-love within anti-Black environments. An analysis of testimonies and interviews generated by participants produced several considerations on the praxis of self-love in and beyond the educational context. Specifically, findings point to the ways Black students conceptualize self-love as affirmations of the Black being, manifesting as presence, knowing, feeling, seeing, doing, and regard.

How Whiteness Fuels Anti-Blackness: Black Leaders’ Experiences in an Urban High School

This article explores whiteness and how it manifests itself in an urban, Midwestern high school. This examination is done through counter-storytelling to unpack how Black women leaders navigate whiteness while simultaneously experiencing anti-Blackness within and outside a research-practice partnership. These counter-stories came from a larger research project on how school practitioners work towards anti-racism using an anti-racist policy decision-making protocol. Much research centers on the experiences of Black students in PK-12 education settings; however, there is an underwhelming amount of research that analyzes how anti-Black racism or anti-Blackness exists in educational leadership. Our findings reveal that Black women leaders negotiate whiteness through various strategies, encounter moments of anti-Blackness and witness it occurring among Black students within the school. Implications of this study illuminate the importance of counter-narratives in uncovering details otherwise unseen, as well as describe the ways counter-narratives moved the work within the research-practice partnerships forward.

Spatialized Race and Sense of Belonging: Experiences of Black Students in Study Abroad

Spatialized Race and Sense of Belonging: Experiences of Black Students in Study Abroad

Exploring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Occupational Therapy Education: A Survey Study of Black Student Experiences

Exploring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Occupational Therapy Education: A Survey Study of Black Student Experiences

Meaning and structure in Black students’ ways of experiencing academic achievement

ABSTRACT Historically White universities in Britain have a long history of misrecognizing the experiences of Black students and rendering their struggles and aspirations a matter of scrutiny. More recently an intense higher education policy focus has been placed on addressing outcome differentials between various ethnoracial groups. Little however is known about how minoritised groups of students experience and understand academic achievement. In our phenomenographic study Black students’ ways of experiencing academic achievement vary from broad expectations of gaining good grades to developing as a person and contributing to the society. Seen through a relational lens, the results can be utilized to identify the aspects of university life that warrant further attention to improve Black students’ experiences during their studies and achieve equitable outcomes.

Toward Black Epistemological Futures: Centering Antiblack Aggressions in Educational Research

Educational researchers have widely used the term “racial microaggressions” as a theoretical framework for examining everyday and subtle forms of discrimination predicated against people of color. However, there are historical and contemporary differences in how Black people experience schools and other social institutions that a racial microaggressions lens does not fully embrace. Using a new frame termed “antiblack aggressions,” I discuss the history and damage of using racial microaggressions to examine the experiences of Black students. Furthermore, this piece calls for a paradigm shift that aligns with the original conceptualization of the term “microaggressions,” re-centers the Black experience, and fosters Black epistemological futures in educational research.

Revealing the Known: The Invisibilized Bias of Commercial Literacy Curricula

ABSTRACT A critical content analysis is employed to scrutinize the second-grade materials within EL education’s English language arts curriculum. Applying critical race theory, this study confronts the pervasive anti-Black narrative embedded in standardized curriculum used in the United States. The study unveils the presence of this narrative in the materials while advocating strategies for teachers obligated to use these resources. The aim is to empower educators to foster critical engagement among students, encouraging them to craft their counternarrative while actively advocating for an antiracist curriculum. The elementary literacy curricula widely employed across the United States tend to propagate a White-centric agenda. Despite attempts to veil biases and racism, these curricula subtly reinforce White privilege through practices such as colorblindness, context-neutral settings, and the perpetuation of the myth of meritocracy. To counter this, a community-centered approach to education is proposed. This approach challenges the entrenched power structures of White supremacy by supplementing mandated scripted curriculum with additional resources and diverse perspectives that authentically incorporate the lived experiences of Black students, families, and experts. This study underscores the urgent need to address the inherent biases in educational materials, advocating for a pedagogical shift toward inclusivity and actively challenging the perpetuation of systemic racism in curriculum frameworks.

Affirming Black Joy & homeplace: a call to action for practitioner preparation programs

ABSTRACT Despite growing discussions of antiracist practices and policies in PK-20 schools, education tends to critique racist structures without providing solutions that bring into the conversation the lived experiences of Black students, families, and communities. While these critiques may be helpful, we suggest these critiques omit practices and policies that attend to how education could become a homeplace that affirms Black Joy. In order to realize the affirmative possibilities of homeplace, we argue that more attention is needed toward practitioner preparation programs as training sites for building out education as a location for Black Joy. We discuss the current context of preservice teacher and counselor education training and provide tenets of Black Joy and homeplace that can serve as guideposts for more complete critical accounts of antiracism.

“Out of the Mouths of Babes”: Testimonies of Black Student Experiences in a Modern-Day Segregation Academy

While many studies have examined the historic and modern impacts of school desegregation legislation on the schooling experiences of Black students in public schools, few have examined the racialized nature of private religious schools. To address this gap, this study explored the experiences of Black, middle school students attending a “modern-day segregation academy,” a contemporary private Christian school whose beginnings can be traced to the implementation of school desegregation legislation. Framed in BlackCrit theory, findings suggest the school reproduced a climate of antiblackness that permeated school culture, curriculum, peer interactions, and pedagogy. In response, Black students implemented various acts of subversive agency to maintain joy, humanity, and faith. This study reinforces the importance of racially affirming spaces, and necessitates the development of pedagogies, practices and policies that honor the spirit of Black students, in all school settings.

The Experiences of Black Students in Physical Therapy Education in Texas: A Qualitative Study.

Racial or ethnic minorities are underrepresented in many health care professions, including physical therapy. Understanding the experiences of minority students in graduate education provides insight into how physical therapy educational programs can promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are factors that have been shown to improve patient outcomes. The purpose of this study is to qualitatively analyze and describe the lived experiences of Black student physical therapists (PT) in Texas. Currently, there is a lack of qualitative research that investigates the experiences of Black students in physical therapy education in the United States. Nineteen Doctor of Physical Therapy students from 8 different physical therapy educational programs in Texas. This qualitative study was conducted using a phenomenological approach. All participants took part in a focus group regarding their academic experiences. Students' dialogues were recorded and transcribed, and the researchers identified recurrent themes. After the analysis of focus group content, it was determined that the following 5 themes characterized the students' experiences: 1) Barriers to enrollment, 2) underrepresentation, 3) implicit and explicit racism, 4) code-switching, and 5) desired image. There is evidence to suggest that Black or African American students are subject to unique pressures that negatively affect their experiences during their PT education. Efforts need to be made by higher education institutions and individuals to provide a more inclusive environment to best support those students. By gaining awareness of the results of this study, educators and students can begin dialogues on how to foster inclusivity and cultural understanding in physical therapy education. Ultimately, understanding the experiences of others can improve how individuals coexist in an increasingly diverse society, and how clinicians provide patient-centered, culturally aware care to patients and clients.

Seen and Unseen: Narratives of In/Visibility of Black Youth Who Attend a Predominantly Latinx High School

Background/Context: Scholars have identified how antiblackness operates as a specific organizational culture across the educational enterprise by examining Black students in various schooling contexts. However, there remains limited empirical research exploring Black students’ unique experiences in predominantly Latinx educational settings. The presence of Black bodies in institutions like schools from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded, marginalized, or “othered” presents an intriguing context to investigate the intersection of race, place, and the politics of visibility. Research Design: Drawing from an extensive ethnographic project on antiblackness in borderland contexts, this article interrogates Black students’ narratives of in/visibility—stories detailing moments when they felt seen and unseen. I used purposive sampling and recruited 20 Black students to participate in focus groups and individual interviews. Focus groups and interviews were semi-structured, using open-ended questions but centered on circumstances related to in/visibility. I also conducted observations in classrooms, hallways, the cafeteria, and other locations across the school campus. Data Collection and Analysis: Data analysis for this study included coding and recoding transcripts and field notes, and writing analytic memos. The analytic memos served as a site of conversation about the data where I could think deeply about the experiences that my participants shared. Coding and writing analytic memos were concurrent data analytic activities. During analysis, I paid close attention to how students described moments of invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility. I conducted thematic coding and analysis of the data, which generated key themes. Finally, I reorganized emerging themes several times in relation to the extant literature and theoretical framework. Findings: Building on prior research on antiblackness in education, I use the notions of seen and unseen to describe Black students’ experiences with antiblack structures, practices, and encounters with their non-Black peers and adults. Black youth narratives reveal that their Blackness is simultaneously rendered hypervisible and invisible through the everydayness of antiblackness. The data also reveal that their racialized experiences with in/visibility were concurrently spatial and had implications for how Black students navigated the physical geographies of schools. I found that unseeing is an active process of not acknowledging the bias accompanying explicit practices that enable different people to exist differently in the same space. To unsee is a rejection of the specificity of Black that encodes how Black students navigate spaces where they are not the somatic norm. Further, this posture impacts Black bodies by making them feel simultaneously like outsiders and insiders. As a result, some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked as trespassers. Conclusions and Recommendations Racial moments have material, emotional, and educational consequences for Black students. Being “different” from the somatic norm renders Black bodies simultaneously highly visible and invisible. Research tends to collapse Black and Latinx students into a broader category of “students of color” without disaggregating the distinctive ways in which racialized school systems impact these groups differently. Further, the data presented here demonstrate how antiblack racism shapes the experiences of Black students and draws attention to the urgency of dismantling the people of color colorblindness in research analysis.

Empathic Approaches for Supporting Black Students During Remote Learning

This article examined how elementary educators understood the experiences of Black students during remote learning and subsequently demonstrated empathy for Black students during the 2020–2021 academic year. While there is ample literature on the benefits of empathy on student outcomes, much of this research falls short in capturing the utility and complexity of empathy in remote settings. Moreover, much of the literature on empathy omits the role that identity plays in conceptualizations of empathy. Findings from this study suggest that in order for educators to bypass the physical and psychological distance created by remote instruction, educators must develop innovative and iterative practices that allow them to develop an in-depth understanding of their students, which will allow them to demonstrate appropriate empathic actions.

“They just wanted to move on”: A qualitative study on the experiences of Black students in classroom discussions on race

The current study used qualitative methods to explore what classroom conversations around race and social justice look like for Black high school students and the role of technology in these conversations at a time when most students were engaged in hybrid or distance learning. Through semi-structured interviews, 16 students recounted their experiences discussing contemporary racial justice issues in school. Participants recalled experiences throughout their schooling in traditional classrooms and more recent incidents in the context of distance learning. Findings revealed that Black students take on much of the labor of educating their classmates and teachers about racial justice issues in class. They also highlighted the importance of safety when having these conversations. Concerning those discussions occurring in virtual settings, students described how technology promoted an environment in which Black students felt safer having these dialogues. Findings from this study emphasize the complex roles that Black students play in cultivating learning environments that raise the critical racial consciousness of everyone in the classroom, including teachers. Digital classrooms and spaces can also potentially serve as an environment in which Black students feel safe to explore and express their perspectives fully. These findings also further highlight the need to build the capacity of educators to facilitate conversations and hold space for all students to make sense of and cope when issues of racial injustice are at play and affecting students’ lives and mental health.

:Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities

:<i>Studying While Black: Race, Education and Emancipation in South African Universities</i>

"You have to strive very hard to prove yourself": experiences of Black nursing students in a Western Canadian province.

This study explored the experiences of Black students in two western Canadian undergraduate nursing programs. Using a qualitative focused ethnography design grounded in critical race theory and intersectionality, participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling. Data were collected through individual interviews, and a follow-up focus group. Data were analyzed using collaborative-thematic analysis team approaches. n=18 current and former students participated. Five themes emerged: systemic racism in nursing, precarious immigrant context, mental health/well-being concerns, coping mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement. An improved understanding of Black student experiences can inform their recruitment and retention. Supporting Black students' success can potentially improve equity, diversity, and inclusivity in nursing education programs and/or their representation in the Canadian nursing workforce. The presence of a diverse nursing profession is imperative to meet the needs to provide more quality and culturally competent services to diverse population.

Encouraging and embracing black diversity in industry

Encouraging and embracing black diversity in industry