Growing up in Scarborough, Stephanie Fearon was raised in a community with a rich tradition of Black matriarchal storytelling.
Through oration, folk tales, music, dance and even cooking, mothers have continued to impart cultural knowledge across generations.
It’s no surprise then, that as the inaugural assistant professor of Black thriving and education at York University, Fearon wanted to explore the ways Black mothers come together with their children to cultivate leadership and literacy skills within education systems and beyond.
Inspired by her grandmother and grandaunts, who came to Canada from Jamaica in the 1960s with limited access to educational opportunities, Fearon’s research studies how Black mothers use storytelling in community-based literacy programs.
With an understanding of the barriers these women face in academic research spaces, Fearon was careful to develop a collaborative approach where Black mothers feel valued.
“They’ve complained, lamented, about the extractive nature of the research process,” she says. “And when we look at the histories and the current relationships between researchers in academia and Black communities, it's not positive.”
Fearon centres Black mothers as partners in the research process, grounding her work in respect and co-creation. To honour the cultural significance of storytelling, she uses an arts-informed approach that allows her to reimagine educational research as collaborative and cultural.
“My studies involve participants throughout all phases of the inquiry process – from helping conceptualize the study to determining how insights are disseminated, reimagining how research can be for us and by us,” she says. The arts, including storytelling, play a prominent role in the daily lives of Black mothers who use it to impart knowledge, deepen relationships and make sense of the world around them.
Fearon facilitates this by expressing her findings visually, through artforms like graphic narratives and short stories. It’s an intentional approach, she says, because “the mothers I work with help determine the best way to engage in any particular research study.”
She notes that Black storytelling is inextricably collaborative, built on relationships, engagement and dialogue between storytellers and listeners. Because of this, studying storytelling and related practices requires rethinking traditional research methods to reach deeper, more authentic understandings.
She sees her creative approach as a way to honour traditions safeguarded and cultivated by Black matriarchs, including her own grandmother and grandaunts. Their stories help to create an archive of the Black experience.
“My dream is that my creative approaches to research serve as an example of how the artistic lives of Black people can be upheld throughout the inquiry process,” she says. “I hope my work inspires other scholars, especially Black mother scholars, to reimagine research methods in ways that is creative, relational and relevant to participants."
Her vision, however, exists alongside a long history of challenges faced by Black communities and scholars in academic spaces, such as systemic racism, sexism and classism.
But the growing number of Black scholars being hired by universities affirms that her work – and engaging in different ways of thinking and researching – strengthen meaningful contributions to research and scholarship.
“York enjoys a legacy of Black students, scholars and community members gathering throughout the year, but especially in February. We continue to gather on-campus and in the wider community in ways that affirm the complexities, beauty and everydayness of Black life and Black living in Canada,” she says. “We come together to dream, to organize and to remake academia and the world around us.”
Fearon recently received a York University Black Research Seed Grant and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, and will use the funding to widen her research scope. The seed grant will support research on the creative lives of Black teenaged girls, while the SSRCH grant will fund a study on the culturally specific leadership approaches of Black women principals and how it nurtures the well-being of elementary-aged Black children.
She’s also started a writing program for Black mothers who are showing up as scholars.
“Dr. Fearon has made an impressive start to her academic career at York with this important research, first obtaining competitive federal and other funds and then embarking on work that’s impactful, necessary and transforming in nature,” says Faculty of Education Dean Robert Savage. “We, in the Faculty of Education, are delighted to support Stephanie in continuing her important work here, which has cascading impacts in and beyond the University, to empower diverse Black communities.”
Her work is also a legacy project she hopes will open doors for her own children.
“I'm already working to remake the university environment,” she says. “My dream is that my children can walk into academic spaces as their full selves and they can just be, knowing that they belong.”
With files from Robin Heron