Because I Am Human: Centering Black Women with Dis/abilities in Transition Planning from High School to College

Abstract

There is a dearth of literature about post-secondary transition experiences of Black women with dis/abilities (BWD). In this qualitative study, I explore transition experiences of five post-secondary BWD from high school to college in order to privilege her chronicles and narratives as knowledge. In addition, two urban public high school transition coordinators (TC) participated in the study. Three inquiries guided my dissertation: (1) features of educational experiences narrated by BWD, (2) features of transition services provided to students with dis/abilities, including roles of and approaches as described by the TCs, and (3) how BWD narratives may be leveraged to critique and extend transition services as the TCs described them. I engaged in three semi-structured interviews with six of the seven participants (one interview with the seventh). I drew from Disability Studies/Disability Studies in Education (DSE), Critical Race Theory, and Womanist/Black Feminist Theory and their shared tenets of voice and counternarratives and concepts of social construction and falsification of consciousness to analyze the narratives of BWD participants. I drew from the DS/DSE tenet of interlocking systems of oppression, DisCrit tenet three, race and ability, and constructs of Inputs and Outcomes in work on Modeling Transition Education to analyze the TCs’ narratives and in connection to the narratives of the BWD. Across both sets of participants, three themes in the form of Truths emerged; they were terrible and sticky experiences of racial/dis/ability oppression for the BWDs and, imposing of whiteness and normalization within the transition education practices described by the TCs. For the BWD, those terrible and sticky truths took three forms: (a) Pathologization; (b) Disablement; and (c) Exclusion. Another type of truth in the BWD’s narratives, however, was Subverted Truths: (re)defined identities and radical love, (re)placed competence and knowledge, and (revalued sisterhood and community, the ways of pushing back and resisting the Truths and their effects. I discuss implications for BWD post-secondary transition-planning-and-programming theory, research, policy, practice, praxis, and spirituality.