Chapter 2: Asking The Right Questions in Urban Education Research: The Role of Privilege

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is tied up with mine, then let us work together. (Lily Watson, Aboriginal activist)

The biographical journeys of researchers and scholars impact their research values, beliefs and assumptions, creating a research identity bound up in histories of privilege or marginality that influences the research questions they ask, methodologies they employ, the lens they bring to their analysis, and ultimately their policy and practice recommendations and implications (Banks, 1998). As a doctoral student at The Pennsylvania State University in the early 1990s, I (Wanda) entered my program extremely excited about the possibility of being able to conduct and disseminate research that would positively impact the African American and other marginalized communities. The faculty in my department were all accomplished researchers consisting of only two African American females both of whom were untenured, three White females (one full professor, one associate professor, and one untenured assistant professor), and a host of White males, all but one of whom were tenured full professors. As new doctoral students, we were expected to identify our research interests and to secure graduate assistantships with faculty who were conducting research in areas of interest to us. Idealistic, I set out to find a faculty member whose interests accorded with my own. As I literally went from office to office speaking with faculty, I soon realized that none of the faculty was conducting research that, in my opinion, would improve the educational opportunities and life chances of my people (African Americans) or other marginalized groups. Even when I approached the two untenured African American females whose research activities were far more interesting and nontraditional than the others, I quickly realized that while they were interested in topics such as multicultural education and early childhood interventions that targeted children affected by crack cocaine and fetal alcohol syndrome, these researchers also used very traditional research approaches. More important, although they were wonderful teachers and brought insights to their teaching that were clearly missing in the other faculty members’ teaching in terms of cultural perspectives, they were not considered “real” researchers by those with the most power in the department—the White males. In fact, several males commented to us doctoral students that these women were great teachers and contributed a lot to service but their research lacked the rigor needed to succeed at a large research institution, because they conducted research in the “soft” versus “academic” areas. On more than one occasion when we doctoral students asked why we were rarely exposed to empirical studies that included race/ethnicity and social class as variables, we were simply told that good educational research is generalizable. Even when we identified the research of scholars of color, we were cautioned that this body of work often did not meet the high and rigorous standards for inclusion in our research activities. This was my first introduction to the notions and assumptions of purity and perceived objectivity in educational research. I would later learn that the faculty in my doctoral program were not, as I suspected at the time, insane and out of step with widely accepted and often uncontested conceptualizations of what constitutes valid educational research. In fact, I have now come to the conclusion that they were in effect “Good Stewards” of the widely held but fallible assumptions that educational research when held to the highest standards and certainly when conducted by top researchers in their fields is at a minimum objective, rigorous, and void of a researcher’s value, beliefs, and assumptions. Make no mistake about it, the faculty that I had the privilege to work with in my doctoral program were really good people, great scholars, and worked with me tirelessly to ensure that I was successful and well prepared for the academy. I owe them all a great debt of gratitude. However, with a few exceptions, they had also bought into the prevailing notions of what constitutes research and they were seemingly unaware of biographical and cultural underpinnings associated with educational research in general and specifically related to special education research. Since for the most part research was presented to me as objective and culture-free and those scholars who conducted research on marginalized communities were at that time marginalized themselves, I was really confused. However, my conceptualization and understanding of educational research broadened and changed significantly after being exposed to researchers (e.g., Banks, Foster, Gay, Hollins, Irvine, & Ladson-Billings) who infused Black feminist literature into their work. These scholars of color were outside of my special education discipline, but they were addressing issues that I yearned to address and they were doing it in ways that challenged and expanded the then current conceptualizations of educational research by approaching their work from a biographical and cultural perspective. What made these scholars unique was the fact that they openly acknowledged that who they were as African Americans in terms of their life experiences did influence the research questions they asked, methodology employed, analysis applied to data, and ultimately their policy and practice implications. They not only shattered the notion that good research is unfiltered, they advocated for research in urban and diverse settings and with often marginalized populations to acknowledge and be responsive to the sociocultural context of the individuals and environments being studied. Additionally, these scholars called for researchers conducting research with diverse and often marginalized communities to disclose their own biographical and cultural selves.