Beyond the white norm: the use of qualitative methods in the study of black youths’ schooling in England

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Abstract
There is at present in England great confusion concerning the schooling of black youths. Much conventional “race‐relations” research is underpinned by models of social pathology that perceives the youths as a “problem.” While carrying out a study of black students, of Afro‐Caribbean and Asian parentage, qualitative research pointed to the need to re‐conceptualise their experience of schooling within a framework that moves beyond liberal assumptions of a de‐racialised, de‐gendered and de‐politicised school system. Placing students at the centre of the research enables us to see how school for black youths is part of a wider alienating response to them that results in their experience of a “different reality” from the white population. In response to this, the students have creatively developed a number of survival strategies. This article explores the implications of the relative autonomy of methodology from wider theoretical and substantive concerns. In this largely autobiographical account the dialectical nature of ethnography is illustrated, with the theoretical#shconceptual analysis grounded in the data gathering process.

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