The Brooklyn College Anti-Racist Participatory Action Research Team launched in October 2022 as a BRESI funded project.
We used Participatory Action Research as our approach to the research. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a framework for creating knowledge that is rooted in the belief that those most impacted by an issue should be the ones to frame the questions, design, methods, analysis and to determine what products and actions might be the most useful in effecting change. A PAR research team is made up of community members who are most impacted by an issue or question. A PAR team pulls from their own expertise, lived experiences, community knowledge, and existing data to collaboratively design the research, collect and analyze data, produce findings, and develop recommendations.
In our case, we came together as students and faculty interested in better understanding experiences of race and racism on the Brooklyn College campus.
We spent Oct – Nov forming our research collective and honing our research question.
We were interested in: What would a students-of-color affirming BC campus look like? And, more specifically we decided to design a study to better understand student perspectives and experiences with faculty.
We spent January building knowledge about: research methods and ethics, oral history, Brooklyn College data and context, and a broad range of resources to better understand meanings of race, racism.
Our methods included:
- auto-ethnography daily diaries
- oral history
- participant observation
In March – May we conducted participatory analysis sessions.
The student quotes in the poster come from our collective analysis of the data we collected. Our hope is that the poster helps spark ongoing conversations and build understanding of how and why it matters to students who teaches them.
