This chapter examines the methodological approach adopted in the study and the epistemological assumptions underpinning the research, namely that the everyday experiences of ethnic minority communities provide the best possible vantage point from which to generate knowledge about white domination. The chapter also summarises how the research sample was assembled; provides contextual information about the research participants; and explains the processes involved in collecting and analysing the data.
Critical Race Methodology
The research uses a critical race methodological approach which is characterised by its insistence on “placing race at the centre of the research process, including in the design of research questions as well as in how data is collected, analysed and presented” (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002, p. 36).
Whereas race, gender and other forms of oppression often fall outside the scope of much traditional scholarship (Collins 1990; Essed, 1991), CRT focuses specifically on the racialized, gendered
experiences of research subjects (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). It is explicit, therefore, in its aims, which are to expand the existing body of knowledge about how constructs like racism and sexism are sustained and perpetuated.
Rather than attempt to understand the experiences of ethnic minority communities from a Eurocentric perspective, CRT has advanced an emancipatory research process which aspires to produce holistic knowledge about ethnic minority communities (Huber, 2008; Tyson, 2003). The approach sits alongside other emancipatory research paradigms that prioritise the voices of marginalised communities often absent from scholarly research. This idea of looking to the bottom (Matsuda, 1995) borrows from feminist research which elevates the position of ordinary women’s voices in research. Frankenberg (1993, p. 7) explains that “since the late 1960s feminists have transformed accounts of personal experience into politicized and theorised terrain”. She notes that feminist researchers embrace:
The private, the daily and the apparently trivial in women’s activities, which are conceptualised as shared rather than individual
experiences and as socially and politically constructed. As a result the ordinary in women’s daily lives are used by feminist researchers as a resource for analysing gendered oppression in society
In a similar vein, critical race scholars draw on the personal experiences of ethnic minority communities in order to analyse how racism functions in society. Indeed the fundamental
assumption on which the approach hinges is the centrality of experiential knowledge (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). Solórzano and Yosso, (2002) explain:
CRT recognises that the experiential knowledge of people of colour is legitimate, appropriate and critical to understanding, analysing, and teaching about racial subordination. CRT views this knowledge as a strength and draws explicitly on the lived experiences of people of colour (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002, p. 26).
By focusing on the experiences of ethnic minority communities, scholars generate new knowledge which challenges mainstream explanations of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression. Vargas (2003, p. 9) defines this knowledge as “outsider centred knowledge”. This is echoed by Bernal (2002, p. 113) who notes that “by focusing on experiences which are not visible from a European
epistemological orientation, a new kind of knowledge is generated which simultaneously interrupts and challenges the flow of distorted stories about people of colour and their capabilities”.
The stories generated in critical race research are defined as counterstories because they directly counter mainstream denials about the existence of racism. Solórzano and Yosso explain, “We define the counterstory as a method of telling the stories of people whose experiences are not often told, those at the margins of society” (2002, p. 32). In education based research this often focuses on giving individuals or groups of students an opportunity to talk about their experiences of struggling with low teacher expectations and a narrow curriculum, which provides a counter narrative to deficit based explanations for poor student achievement (Dixson and Rousseau 2005). In the context of this study, enabling the participants to talk about their experiences of applying to open free schools has unearthed counternarratives which challenge the government’s assertion that free school proposals are assessed via a fair and neutral process that affords all applicants the same opportunity to succeed.
A critical epistemological claim which underpins CRT research is that ethnic minority researchers and research participants are in a unique position to speak about race and racism and are presumed to have the competence to do so. Matstuda for example argues that “those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen” (Matsuda, 1995, p. 63). Tyson (2003, p. 21) further theorizes that the perspective that people of colour bring to research is a unique one, which traditional research methods often fail to recognise and record. She notes this unique perspective comes from what she terms “the specificity of oppression” which “moves the
oppressed other into a paradigm of survival” and creates a view of the world that is not shared by those in the dominant culture.
Just as feminism asserts that there is a link between where one is positioned in society and what one perceives, (Frankenberg, 1993) Leonardo (2004, p. 141) points out that “numerous authors from Friere to Fanon have suggested that racial oppression is best understood from the experiences of and vantage point of the oppressed”, given their unique view of society. Essed (1991) explains her rationale for focusing on the experiences of racially marginalised groups in society arguing that as a result of their constant exposure to the dominant culture, they develop a profound knowledge about how racism is reproduced, which makes them well qualified to unravel racism’s complex web. She notes that this knowledge extends to decoding the covert operations of racism, which as
explored in Chapter 2, are central to the perpetuation and sustenance of racism. This point is echoed by Zamudio et al. (2011, p. 5) who note that ”focusing on voices which are oppositional to the dominant narrative is an effective tool in making visible the structures, processes and practices that contribute to continued racial inequality”. This is well illustrated by the participant narratives in this study which expose a number of discriminatory processes and practices within the free school application process that are concealed from mainstream discourse about free schools. Given the potential for accounts of racism to provide insight into the structural properties of racism, Essed (1991) argues they must be conceived of as more than just merely personal stories.
In contrast to the knowledge about racism ethnic minorities accrue over time, Essed (1991) argues dominant groups are not accustomed to thinking critically about race and do not therefore develop the same level of expertise at recognising racism, which renders them by comparison, less effective sources in research about racism. Furthermore, she argues it is not in the dominant group’s best interest to identify systems and processes they directly benefit from as this would disrupt their privilege and expose the contradictions between the liberal values they embrace and the reality they are engaged in perpetuating (see also Bonilla-Silva, 2014).
Critique of CRT Methodology
CRT’s epistemological stance has been subject to debate and criticism. The main thrust of the criticisms focus on discrediting the reliability of research participants and therefore the validity of the findings generated by critical race scholarship. The assumption that people from a racialized background possess, by way of their experiences, a unique perspective on racial discrimination has
particularly been challenged. Farber and Sherry (2009), for example, reject the idea of a unique person of colour perspective on the basis that there is no empirical evidence that it exists. They further argue that CRT scholars have failed to define the unique voice and what it consists of. Similarly, Litowitz (2009) contests that an insider perspective brings with it any additional value. Duncan (2005) suggests that at the heart of Farber and Sherry’s critique is an objection to ethnic minority communities narrating their own stories, which threatens the idea of a universal white worldview that can be generalised to other communities. He cites a significant international body of literature which shows that people of colour experience and perceive aspects of the education system differently than the white majority population as evidence of the existence of a unique subjective position. Similarly, although based on an admittedly small number of studies, the findings of the ROTA (2012; 2014) research about BME communities’ interactions with the free school policy suggest that BME communities are experiencing and perceive the free school application process differently than their white counterparts.
Farber and Sherry’s (2009) primary argument is that research participants’ stories are not objective and there is no mechanism which can be employed to prove their validity. Litowitz (2009) similarly cautions that there is danger in viewing issues from one (insider) perspective and champions instead looking at issues from different points of view in order to arrive at the fullest, most dynamic
perspective on an issue. CRT, however, rejects the idea that research should strive for objectivity and starts instead from the premise that that “all stories are subjective and the production of knowledge is situated” (Bernal, 2002, p. 120). Duncan (2005) further argues that rather than failing to acknowledge an implicit worldview, as is the case with much of mainstream research, CRT is explicit in choosing to see the world from the point of view of socially subjugated groups. He stresses however, that this choice does not involve excluding other points of view as claimed by Litowitz (2009). In fact, he argues CRT researchers are rigorous in their analysis of “dominant explanations for social problems” (2005, p. 106). In this way readers of CRT research are exposed to wider literature on a subject, which empowers them to accept or reject a scholar’s perspective (see also Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). This is well reflected in this study as the literature review carefully considers the government’s rationale for free schools alongside the available literature from a variety of sources with differing viewpoints, thus introducing multiple perspectives about free schools into the research. Vargas (2003, p. 10) also asserts that CRT findings do not need to be viewed in isolation. She notes that “narratives which are linked to the individual experience in all its subjectivity can also be quantitatively measured in order to establish wider patterns of individually reported
proposers prevents robust statistical analysis of the overall numbers of Black free school proposers and their rates of approval, compared to overall approval rates. Following a number of Freedom of Information requests, the government has begun making more information about free schools available, however ethnicity data remains non-existent. From 2015 onwards the government has published approved applications on their website. All personal details about individual applicants are redacted, however so it remains impossible to draw any conclusions about the racial make-up of approved applicants. Even if ethnicity data about individual applicants were available, it would not necessarily reveal the distribution of power among proposer groups which, as this research and research by Higham (2014a) highlight, sometimes operate in the context of concealed partnerships, which disadvantage parent or community based proposers. Available information about rejected proposals remains currently limited to the name and location of the proposed school and does not extend to information about individual proposers. Although admittedly insufficient to establish the extent of either the participation of or approval rates of the African Caribbean community, I have included a list of schools approved to open between 2011-2014, (Appendix 4), the period in which the research participants submitted applications, to help contextualise the climate in which the participants were operating. The list corroborates research by Gilbert (2011) and Higham (2014), highlighting that well-resourced academy chains appear to have been among the early beneficiaries of the free school policy. One of the recommendations arising out of this research, which is explored in the conclusion, concerns making ethnicity data more readily available in order to facilitate
quantitative studies about the outcomes of BME free school proposals, which would complement the existing qualitative studies as advocated for by Vargas (2003).
The importance of marrying individually reported experiences to wider patterns of exclusion is also made by Essed (1991, p. 54) who argues that: “although real life experiences are a rich source of information and provide insights into everyday racism that cannot be obtained other ways, it is essential that individual accounts are checked for consistency with the structural properties of racism in the system”. Rather than view individual accounts in isolation therefore, Essed (1991) advocates for linking the micro experiences narrated by research participants to macro structures, in order to ensure and increase the validity of findings. In order to achieve this, this study situates the participants’ accounts of racism within the wider context of the historical and ongoing exclusion black communities experience in trying to influence educational institutions, as well as within the disenfranchisement of parents more generally in marketised schooling systems. While it is of course important to think through issues of validity and reliability, Delgado notes the importance of not pandering to critics, especially given that “dominant narratives about merit, causation and blame
are seldom subjected to validity measures because they are embraced as universal truths” (2009, p. 340, see also Zamudio et al., 2011).
A final criticism levied against CRT methodology is that researchers essentialise racialised
communities in the process of conducting their research by sacrificing the individual perspectives of research subjects in order to make ideological based knowledge claims, which minimise the diversity of opinions among research samples (Duncan, 2005). Darder and Torres (2004, p. 104) for example, advance this argument by saying that the “CRT approach to storytelling results in dichotomizing and over homogenizing both white people and people of colour which results in a kind of unintended essentialism.”
CRT scholars have been vocal in rejecting claims of essentialism. Stefancic and Delgado, for example, acknowledge the complexity of individual identity noting that “no person has a single, easily stated unitary identity, which is meant to be representative of the collective experience” (2012, p. 10). Many UK based scholars have also written about the need to proactively guard against essentialism, which as discussed in Chapter 2, is in keeping with scholarship about race in Britain. Gunartnam, (2003) for instance notes that the very act of categorizing social identities, in relation to gender, class, race and sexuality is by default an essentialising process. She posits that it is important to recognise that wanting to put race under the spotlight for examination, in order to uncover oppressive relations of power, always runs the risk of reproducing ‘race’ and ethnicity as
essentialised categories. She identifies that working with the category of race, which she defines as “slippery”, throws up certain contradictions for researchers given that “on the one hand,
researchers want to avoid essentialising race but at the same time have a very real desire to capture it and concretize it”(2003, p. 32). Gunartnam (2003, p. 6) suggests that the only way to counteract essentialism is to maintain a commitment to anti-essentialism by allowing for and reporting the “ambivalent complexity of lived experiences” in research. Hylton (2012, p. 28) also advocates for intersectionality as a tool to ensure anti-essentialist depictions of people of colour saying :
Intersectionality is one of the mechanisms used in CRT to emphasise that though the starting point for CRT is ‘race’ and racism there is no intention to lose sight of the complexities of the intersection of ‘race’ with the constructed and identity related nature of other forms of oppression.
Stanfield (2016) further argues that CRT researchers who minimise differences between subjects in order to strengthen their argument, in fact achieve the opposite effect. He stresses that recognising
that people of colour have a range of identities acknowledges their humanity and is therefore threatening to the status quo because it “disturbs the social, political, and economic arrangements of the dominant group” (p. 52). In this way Stanfield (2016) reframes reporting on the diversity within research samples as an act of defiance which advances, rather than threatens, CRT’s overall goal of redressing unfair distributions of power, while educating the public about the lives of ethnic minority people living in white dominated societies. As explored earlier, in my study I have adopted an intersectional stance and as a result include an analysis of how the variables of gender and class impacted on the participants’ experiences of attempting to open free schools, alongside my analysis of the impact of race. In addition, the findings also include the sometimes contradictory views expressed by participants, which as Gunartnam (2003) suggests is important in terms of guarding against essentialism.
Whatever the merits of the epistemological stance of critical race scholars, Essed (1991, p. 54) argues that ultimately the quality, validity and usefulness of the data collected in research about race and racism “depend on the way the accounts were gathered, the social backgrounds of the interviewees, the interview context and the method of interviewing”, which are the focus of the reminder of this chapter.
My Relationship to the Research
Much of the criticism about the reliability of participants in crafting their own narratives, and the capacity of researchers to analyse and present their findings about those narratives, are
generalisable to qualitative research. In order to address the potential pitfalls cited by critics, critical race scholars prioritise operating in a self-revelatory way by exploring explicitly their role in the research and providing background information about research participants. Stanfield (1994, p. 176) stresses the importance of the researcher’s personal story saying “autobiographies, cultures and historical contexts of researchers matter; these determine what researchers see and do not see, as well as their ability to analyse data and disseminate knowledge effectively” (1994, p. 176). Ladson- Billings notes that the researcher’s involvement may well involve double (or multiple)
consciousnesses in which she or he is operating (2000, p. 272). This is well demonstrated by Carter who addresses the impossibility of defining oneself wholly as a researcher saying, “If I assume a singular identity as researcher rather than embrace my multiple identities as researcher and African American and woman and working class– then I reinforce the legitimacy of the often fictive
that terms like insider and outsider, often used to describe the role of the qualitative researcher, are both insufficient and one dimensional in capturing the role of researchers in race-based research. Instead she suggests Collin’s (1986) concept of insider/outsider, which enables researchers to acknowledge how they are both similar to and different from their research participants, comes closest to expressing the complexity of engaging in research about a community you identify with.
The concept of insider/outsider has been useful in helping me to think through my position in the research process. There are several aspects of my experience which render me an insider, most notably, as outlined in the introduction, my interest in and experience working to advance race