International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

Seen, unseen, and unforeseen dangers: what a White emerging scholar learned about positionality in research with racially diverse practitioners

ARTICLE

Seen, unseen, and unforeseen dangers: what a White emerging scholar learned about positionality in research with racially diverse practitioners

ABSTRACT

Framed by autoethnographic methods, I use Milner's framework for researching around race and culture to critically analyze my work as a researcher with a group of diverse educational administrators. I identify seen, unseen, and unforeseen dangers that I experienced in my research as a white doctoral student and university professor, and consider how they impact my development as an educational researcher. I conclude with implications for doctoral students as emerging scholars interested in researching race as well as implications for researchers working with elites.

For the past ten years, I have had the opportunity to serve as a researcher documenting the learning of a superintendent network sponsored by an educational foundation. I began this work as a doctoral student studying school reform. At that point in time, I had taught middle school for nine years in the San Francisco Public Unified School District. Three of these nine years, I helped to open a school that was then effectively closed when the school board chose to relocate it. Throughout these years, I participated in and/or witnessed limited success of a range of equity-focused reform efforts, and I watched committed equity-oriented educators struggle to effect systems wide change. These experiences led me to doubt the possibilities for equity-focused school reform even as I took this research position. However, the position provided me with the opportunity to engage in research with my dissertation advisor around an aspect of schooling-central office administration-that was new to me. Despite my doubts, I found hope in the equity vision of the educational foundation that supported the network and the commitments of the foundation officers for equity-focused school reform. The foundation drew on Singleton and Linton's work in defining equity as eliminating the predictability of students' background in determining academic outcomes. For foundation officers, all of their work related to K-twelve education is grounded in this definition, including the creation of this network.

Ten years later, as an assistant professor of educational leadership, I would like to take a few moments to reflect on how this opportunity has supported my development as an emerging scholar in the field of educational leadership. In particular, this network's focus on issues of race and racism resonated with my beliefs about the nature of schooling and the challenges of school reform. Working with the network has provided a foundation for my emerging line of inquiry around the development and support of equity-focused K-twelve administrators. As a White person, my racialized experiences in the U.S. as a student and teacher often worked to make race hidden. In this network, I have been pushed to recognize race and whiteness explicitly. Milner's framework for reflecting on positionality, especially around race and culture has provided a useful way for me to reflect on my experiences in this work. Engaging with Milner's framework pushes me to think about what it means to be an emerging White scholar in the field of educational leadership, to engage in research with administrators from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and to talk and write about race in productive, thoughtful ways.

My engagement with the network's facilitation team-a group of six current and past educators who serve as foundation officers, consultants, and university professors (including my doctoral advisor)-in particular has had a powerful influence on how I think about race and racism in educational leadership. This facilitation team was unique in my K-twelve experience because of its heterogeneity-the six facilitators include three Black and three White individuals, three former district-level administrators, three university professors, five men and one woman, with ages ranging from mid forties to early seventies, with one person earning tenure at a university and two beginning retirement (which meant involvement with the network but no full-time employment). I started discussing this heterogeneity by listing individuals' races, and while all of the group's heterogeneities have supported my learning, it is the opportunity to engage in research with a racially mixed group of educators that has most pushed my thinking around race in educational leadership and research that is the focus of this article. To begin, I first position this work within the literature on race and researcher positionality, including studies of whiteness as well as literature on ways to center race and culture in the research process. Next, I discuss autoethnographic methods and my process of analysis for this paper. Then, I share two vignettes that occurred during my involvement with the network. After discussing the vignettes, I analyze them using Milner's ideas of different challenges that researchers face in engaging in work around race, and consider how his ideas might apply to work around race with educators involved in K-twelve public education from various standpoints. Finally, I share some of the implications of my work with this network for myself as an emerging scholar and consider potential implications for doctoral students and researchers in the field of educational leadership.

Whiteness, culturally sensitive research, and how I know the world

Scheurich and Young coined the term 'epistemological racism' to unpack ways that race presents epistemological problems in educational research, arguing that the majority of foundational philosophers, scholars, and thinkers in the U.S. who 'have developed the ontological and axiological categories ... that we use to think ... and that we use to socialize and educate children' have almost all been White-these thinkers have constructed the practice of educational research, embedding within it their beliefs, assumptions, and perspectives. The majority of the research epistemologies in the U.S. come from White social history. Alternate epistemologies have been and are being developed to support researchers in understanding this history and develop new ways to engage in research. Smith's work on decolonizing methodologies, for example, challenges Western ways of research. She calls for indigenous research, asking whether non-indigenous researchers can conduct research with indigenous peoples and how they can do so through a non-imperialist lens. Reading these scholars as a White researcher working with participants from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds supports me in the understanding of my own culturally specific knowledge, as well as that of the individuals with whom I work. Collins's discussion of the outsider within-Black female scholars' standpoint as members of the academy that keeps them on the margins-pushes me to think about positionality as complex and intersectional.

Whiteness studies is another approach that offers an alternate to epistemologies that are implicitly based on White social history but do not explicitly recognize this reality. Whiteness does not just refer to people's skin color; rather it 'refers to hegemonic racial structurings of social and material realities ... that perpetuate racialized inequalities and injustices'. Whiteness is constituted by dynamic, relational processes and practices. Multiple subjectivities exist among individuals who are White, including ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation, amongst others, meaning that there is not one uniform experience of whiteness. At the same time, individuals with a White identity all experience aspects of privilege in the U.S. in K-twelve education and beyond.

Much of the focus of Whiteness studies in education has centered on White preservice teachers, in part, a result of the predominance of White teachers in U.S. public schools where the majority of students are students of color. While most educational leaders (superintendents, principals, etc.) in the U.S. are also White, Blackmore argues that 'the whiteness of educational leaders is rarely questioned.' While much research has focused on the experiences of leaders of color in the U.S., primarily conducted by scholars of color, it is only recently that whiteness has emerged as a research focus, with initial findings that suggest White administrators have difficulty talking about whiteness or understanding racism as a systemic issue. Scholars of whiteness studies argue that White educators need to recognize their racialized history and understand its impact on their identity and development.

Performing whiteness is another central concept in the literature. For Cooks, whiteness refers to 'a set of rhetorical strategies employed to construct and maintain a dominant White culture and identities.' From this perspective, drawing on the work of Butler, race exists through the performance of race-specific acts are coded as White. Individuals are not White per se; rather they perform whiteness through a series of acts repeated over time. When I was student teaching, my understanding of my whiteness was challenged by one of my eighth graders, a first-generation Vietnamese student, who asked me if I was Vietnamese. As a native English speaker with pale, peach skin, I was surprised and asked her why she asked me that question. She said that she saw the Vietnamese language newspaper on my desk. For this student, race and ethnicity was performed through language-they were not given categories based on skin color. Since individuals repeat certain acts and not others, their performances constitute race-at the same time, performativity theory includes the potential for transformation and deconstruction of what seems to be natural.

Focusing on performativity and whiteness is a useful start for this process because it makes whiteness visible in ways that many White Americans avoid. The concept of White fragility acknowledges the 'social environment that protects and insulates White people in North America from race-based stress.' From this perspective, DiAngelo goes on to explain how discussions of race often lead White individuals to engage with anger, silence, or guilt. She argues that most White Americans are racially isolated-they interact predominately with other White individuals and thus have 'reduced psychosocial stamina.' In other words, when even a small incident, comment, or question occurs, White individuals almost immediately engage in defensive behaviors.

For all educational researchers, and especially for those who are White and or see their racial identity as invisible, the literature on qualitative research is clear: it is critical to unpack their researcher positionality-that way that their race, background, and culture serve as the lens through which they engage in, conceptualize, conduct, and write about research. Much of this literature, from scholars of color and White scholars, has focused on power dynamics between researchers and participants, with researchers coming to the work from a position of power as a result of their backgrounds, university affiliations, and other types of privilege. This literature highlights the need for researchers to reflect on their experiences, maintain an awareness of their positionality, and engage in collaborative and reciprocal research projects. Culturally sensitive research guides researches on how to center questions of culture, race, and identity-of both the participants and the researchers. Of note, Tillman's framework for CSR, developed out of her research on African American educational experiences, requires that researchers examine their own positionality in relation to participants. She suggests that researchers' culturally specific knowledge interacts with the culturally specific knowledge of their participants, whether they share a similar culture or not.

Drawing on critical race theory and the literature on race in education, Milner developed a framework to support researchers in 'a process of racial and cultural consciousness as they conduct education research.' His framework guides researchers in working through some of the challenges of engaging in questions of race and culture throughout the research process. The framework's four tenets include researching the self, researching the self in relation to others, engaged reflection and representation, and shifting from the self to system. For the first two tenets, Milner poses a series of questions to support researchers in engaging in the key ideas, which may be specifically difficult for researchers from dominant cultures. Almost all of these questions are followed by the question, 'How do I know?' For example, in terms of researching the self in relation to others, Milner asks, 'What are the racial and cultural heritage and the historical landscape of the participants in the study? How do I know?' Milner calls on researchers to reflect on their backgrounds and that of their participants and to consider the evidence they are using to support their understandings.

Milner suggests that this framework can help researchers to navigate seen, unseen, and unforeseen dangers that prevent them from engaging in careful, thoughtful research around race and or with participants who are of different racial and cultural backgrounds. The seen dangers refer to those that emerge explicitly as a result of a researcher's decisions; unseen dangers are those that are hidden or implicit or dangers that a researcher is not conscious of, and unforeseen dangers are those that are unexpected. Framed by autoethnography, I first use Milner's depictions of these three types of dangers to analyze two vignettes in my research experience, and I then use his framework to support my thinking about researcher positionality in my work on race with the network's facilitation team.