Abstract
Although many adolescent Girls of Color (GoC) from poor and working class backgrounds maintain high academic aspirations, they experience disproportionate levels of school punishment and exclusion. These students often do not have access to safe spaces and a caring learning environment in school. They also typically lack relationships with educators who nurture their academic engagement, affirm their identity, and listen and respond to the harm they have experienced in school. This chapter describes an intersectional justice approach to educating GoC, which incorporates reparative healing methods grounded in interrogating power at the nexus of race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, immigration background, and other ascriptive dimensions. The development of this intersectional justice intervention took place across five Title I U.S. high schools through the Lavender Girls Project (LGP), a research and mentoring group focused on the academic engagement of GoC who have been subjected to punishment and exclusion in schools. Using kitchen table and sister circle focus group practices created by Women of Color, specifically Black women, the author supported, guided, and affirmed LGP participants as they explored how their multiply marginalized identities shaped their academic engagement and experiences with punishment in school. Through a deep-dive analysis of one LGP participant, Chinae, the author demonstrates how these methods can provide students, particularly GoC, with the space to examine the complexities of their identity, and dictate healing and wellness on their own terms. Recommendations for educators, who aim to employ a similar approach, are grounded in the intersectional caring practices of Women of Color who embody a humanist philosophy and care for children within the contexts of their multiply marginalized identity.
To protect the privacy of my participants, all school and student names used throughout this chapter are pseudonyms.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this work was provided by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) through the UCLA Institute of American Cultures: American Indian Studies Center, the Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the Chicano Studies Center, the Carlos M. Haro Scholarship Fund, and Shirley Hune Inter-Ethnic/Inter-Racial Studies Award
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Sanchez, S. (2021). Intersectional Justice for Adolescent Girls of Color. In: Mullen, C.A. (eds) Handbook of Social Justice Interventions in Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29553-0_114-1
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