The Role of Literary Mentors in Writing Development: How Black Women’s Literature Supports Writing Representations of African American Adolescent Girls

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Diversity and Interactional Processes in the Teaching of Writing

Abstract

Mentor texts have been used to help advance the writings of adolescent learners by teaching them how to model a genre, text structure, or literary feature. Similarly, throughout history, Black women’s writings have served as literary mentors to other Black women writers. Taking these bodies of literature together, the researcher seeks to understand the role of mentor texts written by Black women on the writings of eight African American adolescent girls as they wrote representations of their lives while participating in a four-week literacy institute. Findings show that the girls used mentor texts to generate ideas for their writings, assert their identities, understand features of the genre, invoke a response from readers and to imitate a particular purpose for writing.

Author

• Gholnecsar E. Muhammad, University of Illinois at Chicago