Listening to the stories of Black students about race and disciplinary interactions with teachers

For a variety of reasons, discussions of racial issues in schools are often avoided and many of the most insidious forms of racism in schools are latent. These two factors, operating together, keep many aspects of racism in schools hidden. The voices of Black students also tend to be excluded from research into the most critical school issues. Space must be made for the voices of Black students around issues related to race and racism in schools, and light must be shone on those issues so that they can be effectively confronted and ultimately overcome in order to lead to anti-racist schools. Black students who have had documented instances of disciplinary consequences were identified and asked to participate in a series of three interviews—a vignette interview, a photo-elicitation interview, and a Critical Incident Technique interview. Through those interviews, the lived experiences of those students were explored and the extent to which the student-participants perceived their race to be a factor in those experiences was considered. One of the primary goals of this study is to provide teachers with an entry point for examining their own disciplinary interactions with Black students and to consider in their own practice, the ways in which those interactions may result in perceptions that impact the real lived experiences of their Black students. The study resulted in three main findings: Participants perceived disparate treatment by teachers at school in varied and sometimes contradictory ways; participants described encounters that fit the definition of racial microaggressions, in some instances as the target and others as the perpetuator; and positive student-teacher relationships and perceptions of fairness reduced perceptions of teacher racism by participants. This study is only a starting point for illuminating some of the complex issues around race and racism in schools. The type of conversations that this study has begun must be continued for schools to become truly anti-racist. Moreover, space must continue to be provided to listen to the voices of Black students with respect to school issues, particularly those issues involving race and racism