Black females achieve high standards of success, yet their lived experiences are frequently absent from educational literature in Canada. Using narratives gathered through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, this thesis documents the navigational strategies adopted by four Black female students to achieve academic success in learning environments that often predicted their failure. The narratives highlight the factors the girls believed contributed to their academic success, how they conceptualized their identity and the role(s) their identity played in their schooling experiences and academic success. Contrary to deficiencies that are often highlighted in studies on the schooling experiences of Black students, using feminist theory, critical race theory and antiracism, coupled with resistance theory shed light on the positive aspects of these Black females’ schooling experiences in Ontario. Such an approach disrupts negative views of Black students as lagging behind in education in Canada. Disseminating the narratives of successful students provides real life examples for other students to imitate in pursuit of academic success amidst educational and societal barriers. On a macro level, these narratives provide education policy makers with different perspectives on how students struggled to achieve academic success within a system that promised to be accessible to all students.

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Memes are a popular source of online media. As such, they become tools that can distribute racialized and gendered narratives. While memes are often a source of shaming and devaluing Black girls, my research also explores how they can be used as tools to counter and disidentify with narratives. Using Hip-Hop feminism and trap feminism as frameworks, I analyze several memes to not only exemplify the hegemonic narratives of Black girlhood that circulate via memes, but to illuminate the possibilities for resistance and transformation via this technology.

This study examined personal, social, and demographic factors related to physical activity (PA) level and body mass index (BMI) in adolescent African American (AA) females. The participants were 211 AA females from selected parochial schools in a city in the southern U.S. Participants completed the Physical Activity Determinant Scale (PADS: Mitchell & Kontos, 2002), the Three Day Physical Activity Recall (3DPAR: Weston, Petosa & Pate, 1997), the Leisure Time Exercise Questionnaire (LTEQ: Godin & Shepard, 1985), and demographic items. Height and weight measures were taken to assess BMI. Results from logistic regression indicated that the personal factor was a significant (p<.001, ExpB=4.65) predictor of PA level, and the social factor (p<.05, ExpB=1.43), age (p<.05, ExpB=.74), and age at menarche (p<.05, ExpB=.80) were significant predictors of low BMI for age. Results from ANOVA revealed that late maturers had significantly (p<.05) lower BMI scores, but were no more physically active than early and average maturers. Findings suggest that female adolescent AAs exert more control over personal PA factors, than social PA factors, such as peer pressure and sport socialization. Additionally, BMI was not related to PA for this sample, suggesting that BMI may be influenced by other factors not investigated in the current study. Based on these findings, potential interventions should focus on aspects of the personal factor for increasing PA in adolescent AA females. Future investigations are needed to further explore the relationship between personal, social, and demographic factors, and PA and BMI for adolescent AA females.

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Black girls continue to suffer from inequitable treatment in schools resulting in disparate academic and social outcomes. While deficit ideologists have continued to attribute outcomes to cultural deficiencies within the Black community, research has found various systemic issues of racism and sexism seriously affecting Black girls in schools. However, the experiences of this population remain under or uninvestigated. When Black girls’ experiences in school are investigated, they are commonly framed as a group in need of saving and their perspectives and voices eliminated from the work. Further, this group is often homogenized and all their experiences limited to those of the inner-city or urban environments. Using a critical raced-gendered epistemology, grounded in critical race theory and Black feminism/womanism, this qualitative interview study explores Black high school girls’ experiences in a predominately White suburban public school in the southeast. Through the method of storytelling that includes constructing counter narratives, five girls (ages 14-16) relay their experiences in this predominately White suburban educational space. Parent reflections as well as document review augment these girls’ stories to further illuminate their experience. A grounded theory analysis of these data uses my own cultural intuition. This analytic approach foregrounds the intersectionality of Black girls’ understanding of their racial and gendered educational experiences in a predominantly White suburban environment, the systemic barriers that serve to inhibit their success, and the methods of resistance girls use to persist in these spaces. This study is significant in both its methodology as well as results, offering critical insight into how to conduct equitable and liberatory research and create education policies to improve outcomes for this underserved group.

The purpose of this study was to provide an exploratory analysis of African American females achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) within the years 1996 through 2012 across academic contents and grade levels. To conduct this analysis, four questions were posed: 1) What is the academic achievement trend of African American females on the mathematics, reading, U.S. history, science, and visual and performing arts NAEP within the years 1996 through 2012? 2) How does African American female achievement proficiency differ across grade levels on the NAEP in mathematics, reading, science, and U.S. history in 2009? 3) How does the academic achievement of African American females compare to the academic achievement of African American males in core content areas (mathematics and reading) on the NAEP? and 4)How does African American females academic achievement compare to the academic achievement of their female counterparts on core content areas (mathematics, science, U.S. history, reading, visual arts and music) on the NAEP within the years 1996 through 2012? The results of this study are: 1. African American females’ achievement trends mirrored the combined trends of all other populations; however, their scores were well below the other subgroups (Asian, White and Hispanic female students.) 2. African American females outperformed African American males in mathematics and reading. 3. More than 35% African American female students fail to meet the basic level of proficiency in all grades tested in every content area. Moreover, less than 3% of the African American female students scored at the advanced level in any subject or grade level. 4. The current practices are maintaining rather than closing the gaps between African American female performance and other students. African American female student score disparities in all other areas ranged from 1 point to 40 points. The data suggest that preteen and teenage years are important for African American female proficiency. It is recommended that African American female students, their parents, educational professionals, and researchers address the seriousness of the low performance of African American female achievement and institute policies, programs and practices to address their academic needs