Sacred Research with Dr. Tameka L. McGlawn

I was humbled by the invitation to review data from written submissions, various BlackFemaleProject events, and other community contributions. To be invited into such a process where people are asked to bare their souls, their stories, their voices, their experiences—that invitation is one I didn’t take lightly; it was quite the honor to be asked and invited into a tremendously vulnerable process. To be trusted, to hold the sacredness of what was emerging as [founder] Precious and the team collected stories along the way, holding events and inviting people to really step into their own voices, to be exactly who they are and stand in their own truth about it.

The gravity of what BlackFemaleProject has created has also been counterbalanced by the healing that its founder created for herself in the vulnerable space of her own journey, which became a model that inspired the rest of the BlackFemaleProject network to follow suit. My interest arose not only from witnessing Precious in the nascent stages of ideation, brainstorming, and contemplation around what was possible, but also from seeing the way in which she facilitated the process from a stance of inclusion for others. Recognizing that BlackFemaleProject is the vehicle for Precious to address the essential needs of other women experiencing comparable and compatible challenges, I was drawn to serve in a leadership capacity and contributing role, as a listener, an observer, and a humbled student to Precious’s vision.

The intersection of research, practice, and policy across multiple institutions is where I am a broker, a bridge builder; I utilize my leadership to influence decisions and support efforts that are about capacity building, legislative practices, and ways in which we use a range of different research methodologies along the continuum of evaluation and assessment to see where we’re making progress, where we’re not, and what has to be done to make a shift. I thought my experience positioned me to contribute to the individual and collective power that was emerging through BlackFemaleProject. As an education professional and researcher, I’m acutely aware that we’re still dealing with the residuals of a structural system that doesn’t serve all children and families in the way in which those who designed the system would want for their own. These patterns are not limited to educational institutions, though; they are also at the root of the patterned experiences of intersecting racism and sexism that BlackFemaleProject participants speak to through their testimonies.

Given my own personal journey as a Black woman professional, I had to be extremely thoughtful and give myself permission to take time, so that I wouldn’t get lost in how I was interpreting the data. I had to make sure that I had an authentic and rigorously reflective practice in the design of the methodology to review the information and not react to it. It was important to make sure that I didn’t recreate history for someone else or project my own ideas, reactions, or feelings into their experiences. I wanted there to be purity in terms of how I was able to interpret the information from the surveys, written stories, and experiences people were articulating in ways that were so real, telling, and revealing. And so it was critical for me to make sure I had a transformational stance as I used my technical skills and assets to interpret the information that I was consuming, while also being thoughtful about how I could humanize the data and emphasize compassion in my analysis and translation. There was such profound vulnerability and raw trust emerging through the entire inaugural collection; I felt it was my responsibility to honor it all in a comprehensive and sacred way.

The observations, of course, are filtered through my interpretation and I recognize the probability of bias and constraints. Even though analysis is objective, it’s still my lens. As much as I can attempt to mitigate them, there are some limitations to maintaining total neutrality, as everything about my lived experience is lived through this Black female body.

Learn more about Dr. McGlawn on the BlackFemaleProject podcast: Be Expressly You: An Interview with Dr. Tameka L. McGlawn