Disentangling Educational Care and Domination: The Sociopolitics of Race and Detroit Youths' Participation in a Summer Mathematics Program
Creators: name: Hetrick, Carolyn
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: urban education
subject: critical care
subject: ethic of care
subject: community-based education
subject: Detroit
subject: Education
subject: Social Sciences

description: Scholarship has shown how community-based education (CBE) programs can offer unique institutional and organizational contexts for negotiating the meanings and operations of care and racial equity in education. Researchers have also documented that, despite their existence outside of school institutions, CBE spaces interact dominant power structures in education, including race, class, and gender. In this dissertation, I inform the debate about the possibilities and perils of pursuing racial equity and justice through CBE programs by examining the sociopolitics of care in one such program. Using critical qualitative methodology, I conducted an ethnographic case study of the sociopolitics of care, race, and education in the Kids Mathematics Coalition (KMC), a summer program attended by middle- and high school-aged youth of color in Detroit, Michigan. Educators and researchers across contexts—including CBE spaces and schools—have taken up critical care praxis as a framework for joining educational theories and practices that prioritize social justice across individual and systems-level interactions (Ginwright, 2010; Wilson, 2015, 2016). Similarly, education researchers have identified instructional interactions as sites for potentially disrupting dominant systems of privilege and oppression. KMC, as a mathematics program, is a meaningful site for investigating programmatic and instructional discourses and youths’ negotiations of care, race, and power in education. Care—as a matter of interpersonal relations, but also as a resource and a politics—is one dimension of interaction between macro-level systems of privilege and oppression and local education contexts and actors. In this study, I explore the sociopolitics of care by investigating how participants in KMC understand and enact care with regards to education and race. Included in this larger discussion, I explore how participants’ conceptions of care relate to instructional practices and dynamics in the program, including around mathematics teaching and learning. Lastly, I explore how youth in KMC negotiate and make meaning about the sociopolitics of care in their own educational experiences. Using a conceptual framework that brings together critical care theories, community-based education research, and theories of instruction, I analyze in-depth interviews with KMC participants and participant-observation data from my time researching the program. Data show that KMC advances an understanding of care that privileges white paternalistic and abstractly liberal perspectives of race and education. Moreover, data show that common instructional practices and dynamics in the program perpetuate deficit-based perspectives of youth of color. Most of the youth in the program positively evaluate the program as a caring space, even while demonstrating more nuanced understandings of the sociopolitical dimensions of care when sharing about their own educational experiences. I conclude that a study of KMC sheds light on how CBE spaces can advance white paternalistic domination in education under a discursive guise of caring. For multiply-marginalized youth participating in KMC, the sociopolitics of care and racial domination in the program serve to reinforce existing systemic educational injustices and to manipulate youths’ affective agencies in negotiating such injustices. However, I also conclude that youths’ participation in program instruction and sociopolitical meaning-making about care also suggests powerful possibilities for youth leadership in developing justice-based conceptions of care in CBEs. In all, this study’s findings demonstrate how CBEs can both build community buy-in and support and advance systemic racial inequities and harms. They also demonstrate the possibilities of seeing youths’ caring agencies as resources in broader educational and more specific instructional contexts.