Chapter 1: Your Inquiry is Not Like Mine: Structuring a Critical Constructivist Approach to Autoethnographic Inquiry

Black Boy, a classic novel by Richard Wright (1993), is a rich yet simple look into the life of a Black boy growing up in the early 20th-century Jim Crow South. Wright’s story of emotional and physical hunger, coupled with his cry of being misunderstood, inspires my commitment to transform the “doing” of research. The social and academic hunger for visibility and voice moved me to search for an emancipatory research methodology. Like Wright, I needed my ways of knowing to be understood outside the framework of Eurocentric hegemonic ascendancy. Thus, my commitment in conducting research that enlightens and empowers is motivated by the pertinent influence of diverse personalities, theories, epistemologies, and frameworks found in every research milieu. While the seed of forging a path to story myself was planted in my childhood, it grew in my years as an early childhood educator, matured as a doctoral candidate, and continues developing today. Wright (1993) frames my voice for conducting critical and emancipatory research as “a grasp of the framework of contemporary living, for a knowledge of the forms of life about me, for eyes to see the bony structures of personality, for theories to light up the shadows of conduct” (p. 284).